The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 27 (2016)
Copyright © 2016 Toshikazu Masunaga. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
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Beyond the American Landscape:Tourism and the Significance of Hawthorne’s
Travel Sketches

Toshikazu Masunaga*

Introduction: 1832
After graduating from Bowdoin College in 1825, Nathaniel Hawthorne
went back to his hometown, Salem, Massachusetts, where he concentrated
on writing in order to become a professional writer. His early masterpieces
such as “Young Goodman Brown” and “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”
were written during the so-called solitary years from 1825 to 1837, and heviewed those Salem years of his literary apprenticeship as “a form of limbo,
a long and weary imprisonment” (Mellow 36). But biographers of Hawthorne
point out that this self-portrait of a solitary genius was partly invented by his“self-dramatizations” (E. H. Miller 87) to romanticize his younger days. In
fact, he maintained social engagements, and his sister Elizabeth testified
that “he was always social” (Stewart 38). He was more active and outgoing
than his own fabricated self-image, and he even made several trips with his
uncle Samuel Manning as well as by himself.1
While strenuously writing tales, he undertook an American grand tour
alone, traveling around New England and upstate New York in 1832. He
was one of those tourists who rushed to major tourist destinations of the day
such as the Hudson Valley, Niagara Falls, and the White Mountains in order*Professor, Kwansei Gakuin University

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Toshikazu Masunaga

to spend leisure time and to find cultural significance in the scenic beauty of
the American natural landscape. It was the 1820s when Americans finallycould afford to travel, and they followed the example of well-to-do English
people who traveled in search of picturesque and sublime scenery (Sears 3).
The rise of tourism was one of the most spectacular cultural phenomena toemerge in early nineteenth-century America.
Richard Gassan points out that “the first exposure many Americans hadto the idea of travel for pleasure was travel literature” (70). The tourist
guidebook, a new subgenre of travel literature, was a primary source.
According to Hawthorne’s Reading: 1828-1850 (Kesselring 1975),
Hawthorne borrowed quite a few books related to travel both at home andabroad from the Salem Athenaeum. For example, he borrowed Jonathan
Carver’s Travels through the Interior Parts of North-America in the Years
1766, 1767, and 1768 in 1828 and Travels through North and South
Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida by William Bartram, a wellknown American naturalist, in 1831.
Those readings must have raised his expectations for traveling and also
might have aroused his interest in travel writing itself as a promising literary
genre. With the boom of tourism in the United States, travel books had
become steady sellers that were purchased and read by upper-middle-class
Americans, who used them as guides for their own travels. It is quite natural
to suppose that young Hawthorne wrote a series of travel sketches to achievefinancial success and literary distinction.
A letter addressed to Franklin Pierce, his friend from college and thefuture president of the United States, reveals that the tour was not merely
for taking a vacation but that it was professionally motivated to gather
materials for his own future publications:
I was making preparations for a northern tour, when this accursed
Cholera broke out in Canada. It was my intention to go by way of
New-York and Albany to Niagara, from thence to Montreal andQuebec, and home through Vermont and New-Hampshire. I am very
desirous of making this journey on account of a book by which I
intended to acquire an (undoubtedly) immense literary reputation, butwhich I cannot commence writing till I have visited Canada.
(28 June 1832, 15: 224)
It is interesting that a literary giant traveled to the same tourist destinations
Hawthorne visited amid the cholera scare in 1832.2 This figure wasBeyond the American Landscape3

Washington Irving, who had just come back from seventeen years in Europe
to the United States, arriving in New York on May 21, 1832. A few months
later, he made trips to show his friends from Europe around America: hestarted out with West Point and the Catskill Mountains and then went up the
Hudson River in July and to the White Mountains in August.
It is a sheer coincidence that both Hawthorne and Irving made trips
around the same time, but it is no coincidence that both writers visited thesame sites: the Hudson Valley, Niagara Falls, and the White Mountains
were all must-see destinations, highly recommended by tourist guidebooks
at that time. Irving, notably, was one of the key figures who contributed
significantly to the development of tourism in early nineteenth-century
America through his writings. It is undeniable that his two American pieces
collected in The Sketch Book (1819-29), “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legendof Sleepy Hollow,” both set in upstate New York, played a crucial role inpromoting tourism in the Hudson Valley region.
Nathaniel Hawthorne undoubtedly followed Irving’s professional schemeof incorporating famous tourist sites into his imaginative tales. The story of“The Ambitious Guests” (1835) is based on a true tragedy that involved theWilley family in the Crawford Notch of the White Mountains, and “TheGreat Stone Face” (1850) was obviously inspired by the “Old Man of theMountain,” granite cliffs located in Franconia Notch, also in the White
Mountains.
Hawthorne’s solitary tour, conducted in 1832, provided subject matter for
his later imaginative tales, and he wrote a series of travel sketches as a vivid
record of his own experiences. One of the most conspicuous characteristics
found in those sketches is the frequent use of aesthetic criteria of thepicturesque and the sublime. These two aesthetic qualities, which wereintroduced from Europe to the United States in the early nineteenth century,
affected peoples’ ways of viewing the natural landscape of America, and theaesthetic concepts exerted a strong influence on the landscape painters ofthe Hudson River school. In a way, Hawthorne’s travel sketches were aliterary experiment to introduce the aesthetic notion into verbal expression.
There exists limited information about the exact route of the tour
Hawthorne took because most of his letters to his family were destroyed at
his request.3 But it is certain that he did depart Salem for New Hampshire inlate summer of 1832, reached two major tourist destinations, the White
Mountains and Niagara Falls, and probably traveled down the Hudson River
to Saratoga Springs on the way back from Lake George (Weber 3-16).
Traveling was his lifelong diversion, but the tour of 1832 was something

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Toshikazu Masunaga

special for Hawthorne as it was professionally motivated. During this periodof literary apprenticeship, Hawthorne was exploring the prospect of writing
travel literature when he made this tour and was trying to include theaesthetic notions of the “picturesque” and “sublime” into his writings as hedreamed of acquiring “an immense literary reputation” (28 June 1832, 15:224) in the future.

The Rise of Tourism in Nineteenth-Century America
Leisure travel had been an aristocratic luxury both in Europe and America
before the nineteenth century, and indeed it scarcely existed in America at
the beginning of the century. Nonetheless, tourism in America developedwith surprising rapidity, and it became common by the 1830s (Gassan 2-3).
The Hudson Valley region developed into the first major tourist site becauseof its proximity to New York City, a rapidly growing economic center, andthe inland transportation available by water on the Hudson River.
In the early stage of tourism in the Hudson Valley, destinations were quiet
spa and health resorts, and people went there to seek the therapeutic benefitsof drinking mineral water and bathing. Ballston Springs and Saratoga
Springs were such health resorts at first, but soon the quiet atmosphere ofthese places was transformed by the appearance of gaudy, fashionable
tourists who came to frequent the springs searching for “pleasure,” as Irving
noted.4 As the tourist destinations in upstate New York expanded finally as
far as Niagara Falls, the beautiful scenery of the region became the chief
attraction for more tourist visits. The booming of guidebooks,5 travel
literature, and the paintings of the Hudson River school all promoted thecommercialization of tourism in this area and induced people to travel up
the Hudson.6
Irving was one of the earliest major writers who played an important rolein the growth of tourism in the region. He transformed a German tale into
an American legend set in “the Kaatskill mountains” and the Hudson Valley,
and thus he created the most iconic fictional character in America: Rip Van
Winkle. To sustain tourism, each tourist site had to have a gripping story tocapture tourists’ attention along with agreeable infrastructure. “Rip Van
Winkle” (1819) was a perfect story to confer something of interest, uniqueto the Catskill Mountains. In fact, Rip was well commercialized to make theplace into an attractive tourist spot in various ways. It is said that tourists on
the coach heading for the Catskill Mountain House passed a small dwelling
reputed to be Rip Van Winkle’s shanty and the hollow where he imbibed theBeyond the American Landscape5

drink of the old Dutchmen playing ninepins (Schuyler 26).7 Those devices
undoubtedly stimulated tourists’ imaginations about the legendary figure
and added charm to the region.
Hawthorne undertook his northern tour a decade after Irving featured the
Hudson Valley as the setting of his famous “Rip Van Winkle.” Following
the popular route suggested by guidebooks,8 Hawthorne set out north, andwrote the sketches based on his travel. Several sketches of the tour developed
later into imaginative tales set in the White Mountains. Obviously he had
intended to attract readers with the settings of popular tourist destinations,as Irving did with the Hudson Valley in “Rip Van Winkle.”9 It should be
noted that the traveling class and the reading class overlapped considerably
in early nineteenth-century America when “books were still relatively
expensive” (Gassan 78). If a story had an appeal to tourists of the wealthy
upper middle class, the author could expect good sales of his writings as
well.
“The Ambitious Guest” (1835) is one of the earliest tales written by
Hawthorne set in the White Mountains area; it was followed by “The Great
Carbuncle” (1837) and “The Great Stone Face” (1850). On the night ofAugust 28, 1826, an avalanche rushed down the mountainside and killed thewhole Willey family, pioneer settlers of the Crawford Notch. The disastermade the region into a place of fame, and it engendered a host of artistic andcommercial representations that conferred dignity on the site (McGrath59).10 Inspired by the tragedy, Hawthorne fictionalized the catastrophe in atale that made use of his own personal experiences on his northern tour in1832. “The Ambitious Guest” became the most popular fiction of thetragedy, which continues to attract many tourists to the region to this day.
Incorporating a famous tourist site as the setting of a work of fiction is
not rare but a common practice adopted by novelists around the world. But
it should be pointed out that nineteenth-century Americans developed a
special feeling for the landscape of America as they “had sought theiridentity in their relationship to the land they had settled.” The American
landscape was “the basis of that culture,” and the booming of tourism innineteenth-century America was deeply intertwined with the American
aspirations for its nationhood (Sears 4). The involvement of artists andwriters with nineteenth-century tourism, thus, could be taken as an effort toachieve cultural independence in art and literature through their works.
The relationship between tourism and writers or painters was reciprocal,
as they collaborated with one another to publicize their writings andpaintings as well as to promote tourist sites. While many tourists were6

Toshikazu Masunaga

attracted to the area of Lake George by the historical novel The Last of the
Mohicans (1826), James Fenimore Cooper reciprocally gained readershipby featuring the already popular tourist site as the setting of his story.11 And
Thomas Cole joined the collaboration to produce the painting Scene from
“The Last of the Mohicans,” Cora Kneeling at the Feet of Tamenund (1827),
inspired by a passage in the novel.12 Although their involvement with
tourism might have been a pragmatic reason that drew people’s attention totheir works, it is undeniable that those paintings and writings that featured
tourist sites contributed to the establishment of the cultural identity ofAmerica in one way or another.
With his northern tour, Hawthorne ventured into the reciprocal relationshipbetween tourism and artistic representations, and he became conscious of
the artistic criteria employed by painters and writers in assessing the beautyof the American landscape: the aesthetic categories of the beautiful, thepicturesque, and the sublime.

The Picturesque and the Sublime“The Notch of the White Mountains” is one of the earliest existing travelsketches that Hawthorne wrote based on his northern tour. When it first
appeared anonymously with the title “The Notch” in 1835 in the NewEngland Magazine it had an editorial introduction written by the editor of
the magazine, Park Benjamin, which was omitted when the sketch was latercollected in Mosses from an Old Manse. It is interesting that the introduction
reflects precisely the characteristics of tourism in America in the 1830s:
We are so fortunate to have in our possession the portfolio of a friend,
who traveled on foot in search of the picturesque over New-Englandand New-York. . . . Some of his quiet delineations deserve rather to becalled pictures than sketches, so lively are the colors shed over them.
The first which we select, is a reminiscence of a day and night spentamong the White Mountains, and will revive agreeable thoughts in theminds of tourists who have just returned from a visit to their sublime
scenery.
(Benjamin, quoted in Hawthorne 10: 648)
The sketch was written by a traveler “in search of the picturesque,” whose
sketches should be called “pictures than sketches,” and the sketch wasmeant for tourists “who have but just returned from a visit to their sublime

Beyond the American Landscape

7

scenery.” The passage reveals that what tourists of the day went to find on
their tour were picturesque and sublime landscapes.
The picturesque and the sublime were not aesthetic concepts invented in
America originally, but they were brought from Europe and adapted to theAmerican landscape. The sublime is an aesthetic quality in nature that was
best defined by the philosopher, Edmund Burke in 1757. Sublime objects
are “vast in dimensions,” “rugged and negligent,” and “dark and gloomy,”
while beautiful ones are “comparatively small,” “smooth and polished,”
and “light and delicate” (Burke 113). In Burke’s definition, the sublime is akind of natural beauty that causes a feeling of terror among viewers of thelandscape.13
The picturesque stands in the middle between the sublime and thebeautiful (Gassan 55). In general usage, picturesque beauty often refers to“the kind of landscape beauty that would be suitable in a picture” (Lueck 6);
but as an aesthetic criterion defined by William Gilpin, picturesque beauty
is characterized by the “roughness” or “ruggedness” of the objects, comparedto the smoothness that is associated with the beautiful (6).
As discussed, their desire to establish a national identity was a major
factor that made Americans embark on landscape tours. And artists andwriters endeavored to achieve the cultural independence of America throughtheir works that described the picturesque and sublime landscape of theircountry. America considered itself to be “Nature’s nation” (P. Miller 242).14
The picturesque and sublime scenery of America was a metaphor for
American nationhood, and Americans found their supremacy in the sublime
nature of America. Niagara Falls, therefore, became the national icon,
embodying the power of the nation in its sublimity. Along with George
Washington, Niagara Falls was “the most often painted subject in the young
country’s art” (McKinsey 2). And quite a few writings about Niagara Falls
appeared in early nineteenth-century America, including Hawthorne’s travelsketch, “My Visit to Niagara” (1835).
Confronting the rough and rugged natural landscape, picturesque painterspursued the “unity in variety, creation of atmosphere, and strong contrast
between light and dark (chiaroscuro).” To create that unity they added “acoulisse element, a tall foreground object usually at one edge of the canvas. . . somewhat analogous to a theater’s curtain” (McKinsey 59). What
Hawthorne attempted in his northern tour was to make sketches of theAmerican landscape, not by paintbrush but by pen. His travel sketches aremuch imbued with the idea of the picturesque and the sublime, and heincorporated the picturesque conventions of art into his verbal expressions.

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Verbal Sketches of Picturesque Scenery
In his travel sketches, Hawthorne applied the aesthetics of the picturesqueand the sublime to a considerable extent in the verbal depiction of landscapesand scenes that he saw. “A Night Scene” (1835) is a brief but an extraordinary
verbal sketch of a picturesque night view from a steamboat on Lake Erie,
which impresses us with its strong contrast between light and dark, leaving
a distinct visual image with the reader.15 The effect brought by the contrast
in the sketch is equivalent to the chiaroscuro that painters of the picturesqueused in their visual art. On the steamboat, the narrator is fascinated with thenight scene of the bonfire on the bank and the figures of Irishmen who were“continually emerging from the dense gloom, passing through the lurid
glow, and vanishing into gloom on the other side”:
I stood on deck, watching a scene that would not have attracted asecond glance in the day-time, but became picturesque by the magic ofstrong light and deep shade. Some wild Irishmen were replenishing
our stock of wood, and had kindled a great fire on the bank, to illuminate
their labors. . . . In short, these wild Irish, now bursting into sudden
splendor, and now struggling between light and darkness, formed a
picture which might have been transferred, almost unaltered, to a taleof supernatural.
(11: 304-5)
Hawthorne even applies “picturesque” himself to the description ofpeople whom he met. In “Our Evening Party Among the Mountains” (1835),
another travel sketch derived from his northern tour, the narrator makes asketch of guests at Ethan Crawford’s inn as follows: “Ethan Crawford’s
guests were of such a motley description as to form quite a picturesquegroup, seldom seen together, except at some place like this, at once thepleasure-house of fashionable tourists, and the homely inn of country
travelers” (10: 425; emphasis added). After describing the people there
individually in detail, the narrator intentionally juxtaposes those fashionable
tourists consisting of upper-middle-class people including honeymooners
with a half a dozen local wood-cutters of “the rugged county of Coos, . . .
who had slain a bear in the forest and smitten off his paw” (10: 426). By
juxtaposing those two totally different kinds/classes of people who lodged
at the inn together, the narrator adds the rugged contrast to the scene
effectively in the verbal sketch. What attracted the attention of the narrator

Beyond the American Landscape

9that night was the sharp contrast between the characters of two groups ofpeople, and he observed this incongruity just like picturesque paintersemphasized the roughness and ruggedness of objects to express the peculiar
sort of beauty of a landscape.
Along with the strong contrast between light and dark, we find a “coulisse
element,” a tall foreground object on the edge of the canvas in order tocreate unity and characteristic of picturesque paintings of the Hudson Riverschool. Hawthorne also tried to imitate this artistic technique in “The Notchof the White Mountains”:
Height after height had risen and towered one above another, till theclouds began to hang below the peaks. Down their slopes, were the redpath-ways of the Slides, those avalanches of earth, stones and trees,
which descend into the hollows, leaving vestiges of their track, hardly
to be effaced by the vegetation of ages. We had mountains behind us
and mountains on each side, and a group of mightier ones ahead. Still
our road went up along the Saco, right towards the centre of that group,
as if to climb above the clouds, in its passage to the farther region.
(10: 422)
Surrounded by high mountains, travelers in this sketch are overwhelmedwith the sublime beauty of the White Mountains, as they witness the vestigesof avalanches. In this highly realistic representation of the scenery, thenarrator seems to follow the law of perspective in art: the “mountains oneach side” surrounding the travelers in the scene is the verbal equivalent ofcoulisse in visual arts to highlight the mighty mountains in the distanceahead of them.
From that visual richness in the description, it is clear that Hawthorne
was strongly conscious of artistic techniques employed in picturesquepaintings. In his travel sketches, he made a literary experiment in verbalizing
the picturesque and sublime landscapes that he saw as if they were paintingsof the Hudson River school.

Literary Pilgrimage to Niagara Falls
Among tourist sites in nineteenth-century America, Niagara Falls was thepreeminent attraction and served as “the climax of the northern tour for
nineteenth-century tourists” (Lueck 135). Hawthorne was also attracted to
the falls and expressed his special feeling about the place in his travel

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Toshikazu Masunaga

sketch, “My Visit to Niagara,” as if it were a religious shrine: “Never did apilgrim approach Niagara with deeper enthusiasm, than mine” (11: 281).
On this sacred place of sublime beauty, Hawthorne tries to write a verbal
sketch in the form of visualization just like he did with other picturesquesceneries. The narrator “beheld a broad sheet of brilliant and unbroken
foam, not shooting in a curved line from the top of the precipice, but falling
headlong down from height to depth” (11: 283; emphasis added); he “lookedalong the whitening rapids, and endeavored to distinguish a mass of water
far above the fall” (11: 283-84; emphasis added); and he “took in the whole
scene at a glance, and tried to comprehend it in one vast idea” (11: 284;
emphasis added) casting his eyes across the river and to every side. The
narrator immerses himself in the act of seeing in order to draw a verbal
sketch of the place. And he asks himself: “Were my long desires fulfilled?
And had I seen Niagara?” (11: 284).
Compared to other travel sketches of his northern tour, however, thenarrator of “My Visit to Niagara” is strangely diffident in depicting thesublime landscape. When he arrived at Niagara, he did not rush to the falls
to enjoy the sublime scenery, but he cared about “the dinner-hour” of thehotel first. Waiting for the dinner, he becomes depressed in mood:
Within the last fifteen minutes, my mind had grown strangely
benumbed, and my spirits apathetic, with a slight depression, notdecided enough to be termed sadness. My enthusiasm was in a deathlike
slumber. . . .
Such has often been my apathy, when objects, long sought, andearnestly desired, were placed within my reach. . . . Finally, withreluctant step, and the feeling of an intruder, I walked towards Goat
Island.
(11: 282)
What made him so depressed about observing Niagara Falls? Lazar Ziff
contends that “the fear of failure–the falls’ failure to meet expectations, his
own failure to be able to see through his own eyes rather than the eyes of
those who had written the descriptions he had read–held him back” (230).
In fact, the narrator himself confesses his inability to describe the falls
honestly as follows: “My mind had struggled to adapt these false conceptions
to the reality, and finding the effort vain, a wretched sense of disappointment
weighed me down. I climbed the precipice, and threw myself on the earth–feeling that I was unworthy to look at the Great Falls, and careless aboutBeyond the American Landscape11beholding them again” (11: 284; emphasis added).
It is interesting to note that the word, “disappointment,” appears in aremarkably high percentage of visitors’ accounts and guidebooks to the fallsof the day (Sears 15). When Margaret Fuller visited Niagara Falls in 1843,
she described her feeling on the spot in her travel sketches as follows:
When I arrived in sight of them [the rapids] I merely felt, “ah, yes, hereis the fall, just as I have seen it in pictures.” When I arrived at theterrapin bridge, I expected to be overwhelmed, to retire trembling fromthis giddy eminence, and gaze with unlimited wonder and awe upon
the immense mass rolling on and on, but, somehow or other, I thought
only of comparing the effect on my mind with what I had read andheard. I looked for a short time, and then with almost a feeling of
disappointment, turned to go to the other points of view to see if I was
not mistaken in not feeling any surpassing emotion at this sight.
(8; emphasis added)
Fuller’s comment on the falls reveals that Hawthorne’s response at
Niagara Falls was not peculiar to him but was a common visitors’ experience
there. He endeavored to describe the sublime landscape of the falls
consistently to the end of the sketch. But he could not discover any further
semiotic meanings from the falls to be added than their already establishedsignificance as the power of the Creator or the supremacy of America.
The narrator makes the excuses that “time and thought must be employedin comprehending it” (11: 285) in order to finally attain the state of rapture
after the first disappointment. Was Niagara Falls too vast and sublime to
depict entirely, and did he need more time to complete the description? No.
No matter how long he stayed there to capture the sublimity of the falls, hecould never reach his goal. What afflicted him was the unsolvable
discrepancy between his already established knowledge about the place
formed by travel accounts and pictures of the falls and the actual Niagara
Falls he was just witnessing. What occupied the narrator’s mind invariably
in the sketch was an envious thought toward old discoverers of the falls:“Oh, that I had never heard of Niagara till I beheld it! Blessed were thewanderers of old, who heard its deep roar, sounding through the woods, as
the summons to an unknown wonder”(11: 284).
At the very last moment of his departure, the narrator suddenly fell into acurious trance state:

12Toshikazu Masunaga

The golden sunshine tinged the sheet of the American cascade, andpainted on its heaving spray the broken semicircle of a rainbow,
Heaven’s own beauty crowning earth’s sublimity. . . . The solitude of
the old wilderness now reigned over the whole vicinity of the falls. My
enjoyment became the more rapturous, because no poet shared it–nor
wretch devoid of poetry, profaned it: but the spot, so famous throughthe world, was all my own!
(11: 288; emphasis added)
His conversion from the unintelligibility of the falls’ sublimity to the fullpossession of them is so abrupt that it is not explicable at all. As Fuller notedthat “happy were the first discoverers of Niagara, those who could comeunawares upon this view and upon that, whose feelings were entirely theirown” (9), only the first discoverers of the falls could probably enjoy the
rapturous feelings, occupying the sublime scenery and wonders as theirown.
Here is a young writer struggling to write something unique about theworld-famous tourist site. The title of the sketch, “My Visit to Niagara,”
thus, is the reflection of his strong desire to write a sketch of his own.
Although he faced the difficulty of trying to exceed existing travel accounts
and in fact failed, “My Visit to Niagara” was part of his study of writing
travel sketches, and he was on his way with his literary apprenticeship.
Exploring the possibilities of aesthetics, he continued his pilgrimage. And
he discovered another form of literary expression at Fort Ticonderoga near
the shores of Lake Champlain.

Beyond the American Landscape
In 1836, just one year after the publication of “My Visit to Niagara,” “OldTiconderoga, a Picture of the Past” was published anonymously in the
February issue of American Monthly Magazine. In this travel sketch,
Hawthorne made significant progress in his range of literary expression:
These are old French structures, and appear to have occupied threesides of a large area, now overgrown with grass, nettles, and thistles.
The one, in which I sat, was long and narrow, as all the rest had been,with peaked gables. The exterior walls were nearly entire, constructedof gray, flat, unpicked stones, the aged strength of which promised

Beyond the American Landscape13

long to resist the elements, if no other violence should precipitate theirfall. The roof, floors, partitions, and the rest of the wood-work, hadprobably been burnt, except some bars of stanch old oak, which were
blackened with fire but still remained embedded into the window-sills
and over the doors. . . . Grass and weeds grew in the windows, and in
all the crevices of the stone, climbing, step by step, till a tuft of yellow
flowers was waving on the highest peak of the gable. Some spicy herb
diffused a pleasant odor through the ruin. . . .
Here I sat, with those roofless walls about me, the clear sky over myhead, and the afternoon sunshine falling gently bright through thewindow-frames and doorway. I heard the tinkling of a cow-bell, thetwittering of birds, and the pleasant hum of insects. Once a gay
butterfly, with four gold-speckled wings, came and fluttered about myhead, then flew up and lighted on the highest tuft of yellow flowers,
and at last took wing across the lake. Next a bee buzzed through thesunshine, and found much sweetness among the weeds. After watching
him till he went off to his distant hive, I closed my eyes on Ticonderoga
in ruins, and cast a dream-like glance over pictures of the past, andscenes of which this spot had been the theatre.
(11: 188-89)
Sitting down in one of the roofless barracks, the narrator describes theruin in much detail. It is impressive that Hawthorne had become morerefined than he was earlier in depicting the picturesque scenery in the sketch.
However, it should be noticed that the refinement is not achieved solely by
the act of seeing. Along with the precise and colorful description of the oldfort, it is worthy of remark that he makes the scene alive by employing
sensations other than sight. While sitting in the ruin, he smells “a pleasantodor” diffused from some spicy herb, hears “the tinkling of a cow-bell, thetwittering of birds, and the pleasant hum of insects,” and from the clear blue
sky above him, the buzz of a bee reaches his ears. He is no longer obsessedwith the act of seeing, which he had leaned on heavily to describe thesublimity at Niagara Falls.
Although Ticonderoga was a bloody battlefield generations ago, thepresent atmosphere of the place he describes is quite peaceful. Hawthorne,
the narrator, who has made a step forward to maturity in artistic representation,
is not as intense as he was in “My Visit to Niagara.” Freed from the constraintof the visual actualities, he now follows his imagination into the historicalpast of the landscape that he describes. After describing the old fort in much

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Toshikazu Masunaga

detail, not only visually but also through sensations, he summons up peopleof the past involved in many battles, from one to the next.
General Abercrombie suffered a devastating setback in the Battle of Fort
Carillon in 1758, but Jeffery Amherst, commander in chief of the British
Army, took the fort from French troops the next year. Nearly twenty years
later, the American Revolutionary War broke out, and Ethan Allen summoned
the British Army at the fort to surrender. It was in 1777 when Arthur St.
Clair and his troops were forced to retreat from the fort after brief occupancy
of it, surrounded by British forces commanded by General Burgoyne.
Suddenly, the narrator awakens from his reverie when he hears the sound ofa bell ringing from a steamboat on Lake Champlain. The ghosts hesummoned from the past had all disappeared, and he now beholds “only thegray and weed grown ruins”(11: 191). The narrator made a journey into thehistorical past through the medium of the ruin and returned to the present.
The brief travel sketch “Old Ticonderoga, a Picture of the Past” is aprecursor to the Hawthornesque manner of historical representation. Later,
it became a customary practice for him to use ruins or old objects as
doorways into the past; in “Grandfather’s Chair” (1849), a historical accountwritten for children, Grandfather tells a history of America to young children
by describing the succession of ownerships of an old chair “made of oak,which had grown dark with age” (6: 10). In The Scarlet Letter (1850), his
magnum opus, a “rag of scarlet cloth” (1: 31) found in the second story of
the Custom-House beckons the narrator to the early days of Puritan New
England; the old Pyncheon House is a structure “to connect a bygone timewith the very present that is flitting away from us” in The House of theSeven Gables (1851) (2: 2). He had to resort to historical imagination towrite a romance in a country “where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no
mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplaceprosperity, in broad and simple daylight” (4: 3).
For Hawthorne, the tour of 1832 was a literary trial and error to refine his
artistry by employing the fashionable aesthetic ideas of the picturesque andsublime. “My Visit to Niagara” resulted in a literary impasse as Hawthorne
tried to describe the American icon. But we can see his literary progress in“Old Ticonderoga, a Picture of the Past.” The narrator has a much morerelaxed atmosphere when he depicts the old ruin, releasing himself from theobsession of seeing, and he immerses himself in all his senses as well as
exercising his historical imagination. While working on the improvement of
his art of writing, Hawthorne observed the changes that had happened in the
country, too. He witnessed that pristine nature was disappearing rapidlyBeyond the American Landscape15

from America with massive land development. He observed not only theAmerican landscape but also American people: “Here is the worshipper of
Mammon at noonday; . . . here is the American!” (“The Canal-Boat,” 10:435). As other American tourists sought their national identity in theirnation’s landscape, Hawthorne as a tourist also tried to investigate his
cultural identity during his 1832 tour. And in his later writings, he continued
his effort to find it in the picture of the past beyond the American landscape.

Notes
In a letter to Louisa Hawthorne, Nathaniel’s younger sister, dated August 24, 1829,
Hawthorne wrote about “many marvelous adventures” he had during the trip toConnecticut with his uncle, Samuel Manning (15: 198). Traveling was a constantdiversion for him: “Once a year or thereabouts, I used to make an excursion of a few
weeks, in which I enjoyed as much of life as other people do in the whole year’s around”(1: 97).
2 Cholera raged not only in the southern part of Canada, but it also hit New Yorkseverely, where 2,565 New Yorkers were dead by mid-August of 1832 (Jones 299). In a
letter to his brother Peter in Paris, Irving notes that he found New York “desolate anddeserted on account of the cholera” when he stopped over in the city on the way backfrom his trip to the White Mountains (P. M. Irving 29).
3 See Alfred Weber, “Hawthorne’s Tour of 1832,” 2; and Nelson F. Adkins, “Early
Projected Works of Hawthorne,” 131.
4 Irving had already paid attention to the trend of tourism as early as the first decadeof the nineteenth century, and he noted the sudden change that happened at the springs inan article titled “Style at Ballston” for the periodical Salmagundi:
1

It originally meant nothing more than a relief from pain and sickness; and thepatient who had journeyed many a weary mile to the Springs, with a heavy heart,and emaciated form, called it a pleasure when he threw by his crutches, and danced
away from them with renovated spirits and limbs jocund with vigor . . . when, lo!
all of a Sudden Style made its baneful appearance in the semblance of a gig andtandem, a pair of leather breeches, a liveried foot man and cockney!–since that fatal
era pleasure has taken an entire new signification, and at present means nothing but
Style.


Irving, “Style at Ballston” (Thursday, October, 15, 1807), Salmagundi, 286.
The fashion of drinking mineral waters at springs and expecting medicinal effect was

16Toshikazu Masunaga

influenced by spa culture and the concept of hydropathy, both of which have a long
history in Europe (Gassan 13-15). Sterngass points out that drinking mineral water wasa popular alternative medical treatment in America “in an age of high mortality andpuzzling epidemics” (8).
5 The first popular guide that entered the market was Gideon M. Davison’s The
Fashionable Tour or, a Trip to the Springs, Niagara, Quebeck, and Boston, in the Summerof 1821 (1822). Theodore Dwight’s The Northern Traveller; Containing the Routes to
Niagara, Quebec, and the Springs (1825) was another popular guidebook of the day(Brown 28).
6 The name “Hudson River school” was coined later, in the 1870s, and initially usedpejoratively by critics of the day to criticize their old-fashioned landscape paintings(Kornhauser 14).
7 Catskill Mountain House, built in 1823 and opened in 1824, is a grand scenic hotel
standing on a rock shelf in Pine Orchard above the Hudson Valley. It became itself atourist attraction and a favorite subject of American landscapes for Hudson River school
painters such as Thomas Cole and Asher B. Durand (Zandt 170-88).
8 It has been pointed out that Hawthorne must have consulted some of thoseguidebooks. Lueck mentions Dwight’s popular tour guide The Northern Traveller(1825), which Hawthorne probably used to plan his tour. Dwight touts the White
Mountains as “Switzerland in the United States” (175). See Weber, “Hawthorne’s Tourof 1832,” 10; Lueck, American Writers and the Picturesque Tour, 121.
9 “Rip Van Winkle” starts with the remark, “Whoever has made a voyage up the
Hudson must remember the Kaatskill mountains” (Irving 769), and in reality, quite a few
tourists had already “made a voyage up the Hudson” at that time (Gassan 78). The
beginning of the story invites those tourists to recall their fond memories of the tour they
made in an imaginative way, and it could possibly encourage others to pay a visit to theplace to see the story setting with their own eyes.
10 The slide that destroyed the Willey family became a familiar motif for picturesquepainters, and guidebook writers also devoted much space to the disaster. Gideon M.
Davison writes about the impact of the avalanche on White Mountain tourism: “The
number of visitors to the White Mountains has been considerably increased, on accountof the interest excited by these avalanches” (339).
11 Sears makes an important comment on the description of nineteenth-century tourist
sites written by the popular authors: “Like Irving’s tales, Cooper’s novels are remarkably
self-conscious and external to the place they treat. They invent the region rather thanexpress it” (62).
12 Just as novelists did not necessarily describe tourist sites faithfully, Thomas Colemade a significant modification in this painting. The background scene of the picture is
not that of Lake George but of the White Mountains (Kornhauser 77).

Beyond the American Landscape17“Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say,whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in amanner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (Burke 36).
14 Intellectuals in the early nineteenth century identified “the health, the very
personality of America with Nature.” They set Nature “in opposition to the concept ofcity, the railroad, the steamboat” (P. Miller 242).
15 According to Weber, “A Night Scene” was included in “Sketches from Memory. By
a Pedestrian. No.2” published in the New-England Magazine (December 1835) and it
never appeared in any collection of Hawthorne’s short fiction published during his
lifetime (34). Lueck refers to “A Night Scene” as “an excellent example of how contrast
and unity can function in picturesque composition” (8), and she contends that“Hawthorne’s sketch suggests some of the diverse tonal qualities possible in picturesquediscourse” (9).
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