All these circumstances
are unfortunate, because they make the solution of doubts concerning the
early notes quite impossible, for the present.
The fabrication of the journal by a person possessed of some literary
skill and familiar with the localities mentioned, at dates so long ago
as 1816 to 1819, might not be an impossible feat, but it is an extremely
improbable one. It is not likely that an ordinary impostor would hit
upon the sort of incident selected for mention in these extracts. Even
if he drew upon circumstances of his own boyhood, transferring them to
Hawthorne's, he must possess a singularly clear memory, to recall
matters of this sort; and to invent them would require a nice
imaginative faculty. One of the first passages, touching the "son of old
Mrs. Shane" and the "son of the Widow Hawthorne," is of a sort to
entirely evade the mind of an impostor. The whole method of observation,
too, seems very characteristic. If the portion descriptive of a raft and
of the manners of the lumbermen be compared with certain memoranda in
the "American Note-Books" (July 13 and 15, 1837), derived from somewhat
similar scenes, a general resemblance in the way of seizing
characteristics will be observed. Of course, if the early notes are
fabrications, it may be that the author of them drew carefully after
passages of the maturer journal, and this among others. But the
resemblance is crossed by a greater youthfulness in the early notes, it
seems to me, which it would be hard to produce artificially.
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