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HAWTHORNE AND HIS CIRCLE

BY

JULIAN HAWTHORNE

ILLUSTRATED

[IMAGE: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)]

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My
father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A
revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and
shadows of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's
life and mine

I

Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My
mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of
imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile
indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on
Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted
mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr.
Pickwick--My father in 1850--The flowered writing-gown, and the ink
butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second
floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my
aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of
the age

II

Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea might have
done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--The Unpardonable Sin
and the Death--less Man--The little red house--Materials of
culture--Our best playmates--The mystery of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our
intellectual hen-fishing for poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with
one foot on the ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the
brook--Tanglewood--Nuts--Giants and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses,
dark eyes, ambrosial breath-My first horseback ride--Herman Melville's
stories--Another kind of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning ladies and
melancholy-sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I abominate the sight
of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The truth of fiction--An
eighteen-months' work--We leave five cats behind

III

Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's
fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle Horace--His
vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's first tears--The
heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine--The chief incident of the
reception--Blithedale and Brook Farm--Notes from real life--Rough
draughts--Paths of composition--The struggle with the
Pensioner--Hawthorne's method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden
walls and a roof--Mr. Alcott's assthetic carpentering--Appurtenances
of "The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President--"The most homeless
people in the world"

IV

A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His
incorrigible modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common men feel
more like Emerson than he did--His personal appearance--His favorite
gesture--A glance like the reveille of a trumpet--The creaking
boots--"The muses are in the woods"--Emerson could not read
Hawthorne--Typical versus individual--Benefit from
child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--Sounds of distant battle--Politics,
sociology, and grape-culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry
Stoddard--A country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An
unwritten romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's
tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer than in
the world--The return of the pilgrim

V

A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the carpenter--W.
D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An aristocratic acrobat--Speech that
beggars eulogy--The boots of great travellers--Complimentary
cannon--The last infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden
promise: the spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and
future--The coquetry of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The
thirsty island--Gloomy English comforts--Systematic geniality--A
standing puzzle--The respirator--Scamps, fools, mendicants, and
desperadoes--The wrongs of sailor-men--"Is this myself?"--"Profoundly
akin"--Henry Bright--Charm of insular prejudice--No stooping to
compromise--The battle against dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An
English-, Irish-, and Scotchman--An Englishman owns his country--A
contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable gateway--Years of memorable
trifles

VI

Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--Varieties of
equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming peril--Being dragged to
the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and hopelessness of
destitution--Villages rooted in the landscape--Evanescence of the
spiritual and survival of the material--"Of Bebbington the holy
peak"--The Old Yew of Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and
afternoon tea--An East--Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in
the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to Longfellow--Real
breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-pugilist--Clean-cut, cold,
gentle, dry--A respectable female atheist--The tragedy of the red
ants--Voluptuous struggles--A psalm of praise

VII

Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--The average
man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--Shielded by rose-leaves of
culture and refinement--The English middle class--Prejudice,
complacency, and Burke's Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or
Browning--Satisfaction in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A
damp, winding, verdurous street--The parent of stucco
villas--Inactivity of individual conscience--A plateau and a
cliff--dwelling--"The Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgilianae--A
division in the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and
card-playing--Exercise for mind and
body--Knight-errantry--Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman
and the cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr. Squarey
and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of jolly

VIII

Cataclysmic adventures--On the trail of dazzling fortunes--"Lovely,
but reprehensible Madham"--The throne saves the artist--English robin
redbreast--A sad and weary old man--"Most indelicate woman I've ever
known"--Perfectly chaste--Something human stirred dimly--"She loves
me; she loves me!"--The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown--Portentous
and thundering title--Honest English simplicity--"The spirit
lacking"--Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin--A famous and charming
woman of genius--Deep and wide well of human sympathy--The
whooping-cough

IX

Two New England consciences--Inexhaustible faith and energy--Deep and
abiding love of England--"'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore"--"He
took an' he let go"--Naked mountains--The unsentimental little
quadruped--The human element in things sticks--The coasts of
England--A string of sleepy donkeys--Unutterable boy-thoughts--Grins
and chuckles like an ogress---Hideous maternal parody---The adorable
inverted bell-glass--Strange things happen in the world--An ominous
clouding of the water--Something the world has never
known--Overweening security--An admonition not to climb too high--How
vice may become virtue by repetition--Corporal Blair's
chest--Black-Bottle Cardigan--Called to Lisbon

X

If there were boarding-houses in paradise--Blodgett, the delight of
mankind--Solomon foresaw her--A withering retort--A modest, puny poise
about her--Hidden thoughts derived from Mother Eve and Grecian
Helen--The feminine council that ruled the Yankee captains--Bonds of
fraternity, double-riveted and copper-fastened--Through the
looking-glass--Men only of the manliest sort--The
lady-paramount--Hands which were true works of art--Retained his
dignity without putting it on--Sighed heavily over my
efforts--Unctuous M. Huguenin--"From dawn to eve I fell"--The
multum-in-parvo machine--"Beauty and the Beast"--Frank
Channing--"Blood-and water!"--A lapful of Irish stew

XI

Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you marry that
woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--"The worst book anybody
ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I ever saw"--A great deal of the
feminine in Reade--Fire, pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A
philosophical library in itself--Amusing appanage of his own
book--Oily and voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the
_os-rotundas_ sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word
of it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had
lived--Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks
through the mind of a third person--A delightful
Irishman--Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole
line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new
sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed--Indomitable
figure, aggressively American--Too much of the elixir of life--A
little strangeness between us--Sunshine will always rest on it

XII

Talked familiarly with kings and queens--Half-witted girl who giggled
all the time--It gnawed me terribly--A Scotch terrier named Towsey--A
sentiment of diplomatic etiquette--London as a physical entity--Ladies
in low-necked dresses--An elderly man like a garden-spider--Into the
bowels of the earth--The inner luminousness of genius--Isolated and
tragic situation--"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"--The great,
wild, mysterious Borrow--Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and
awful--"Ma'am, you expose yourself!"--Plane, spokeshave, gouge, and
chisel--"I-passed-the-Lightning"--Parallel-O-grams--A graduate of
Antioch--"Continual cursing"--A catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable
sisterhood"--"In truth I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide-awake of
these things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at
Folkestone for France

XIII

Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but perilous
woman with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal ice-palace--Confused
mountain of family luggage--Poplars for lances--Miraculous crimson
comforters--Rivers of human gore--Curling mustachios and nothing to
do--Odd behavior of grown people--Venus, the populace, and the
MacDaniels--The happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her
constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations--Sitting
up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An old passion
reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea-anemones--If you were in
the Garden of Eden--An umbrella full of napoleons--Was Byron an
Esquimau?

XIV

Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George Combe turned
out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright Titian hair--"All that's
left of him"--The pyramidal man of destiny--The thoughts of a boy are
long, long thoughts--Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the
microscope--A stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My
father's jeremiades--Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as
whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"--"The
brazen trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases of
feeling--Springs of creative imagination roused--The Roman fever--A
sad book--Effects of the death-blow--The rest is silence

XV

The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor, battered,
wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and scourge--Dulce est
desipere in loco--A rollicking world of happy fools--Endless sunshine
of some sort--Greenwich Fair was worth a hundred of it--They thundered
past, never drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and
strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of dressing
themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat wife--Apparent license
under courteous restraint--He laughed and pelted and was
pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I saw him last--A too facile
power--A deadly shadow gliding close behind--Set afire by his own
sallies--"Thy face is like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in
the clay--"Wer nie sein Brod mit thranen ass."

XVI

Drilled in Roman history--Lovely figures made of light and
morning--What superb figures!--The breath and strength of immeasurable
antiquity--Treasures coming direct from dead hands into mine--A
pleasant sound of coolness and refreshment--Receptacles of death now
dedicated to life--The Borghese is a forest of Ardennes--Profound and
important communings--A smiling deceiver--Of an early-rising
habit--Hauling in on my slack--A miniature cabinet magically made
Titanic--"If I had a murder on my conscience"--None can tell the
secret origin of his thoughts--A singularly beautiful young woman--She
actually ripped the man open--No leagues of chivalry needed in Rome--A
resident army--Five foot six--Corsets and padding--She was wounded in
the house of her friends

XVII

Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--Wholly unlike
anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--Back to the Gods and the
Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I was
in a state of some little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most
thorough-going of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An
adventure in Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and
saturnine genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and
fireworks--The Faun--Enjoying Rome--First impressions--Lalla's curses

XVIII

In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail-shells--Broad,
flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow-pipes--Ghostly
yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An ideal bust and a living
one--The enigma of spiritualism--A difficult combination to
overthrow--The dream-child and the Philistine--Dashing and plunging
this way and that--Teresa screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and
ghostly voices--My father would have settled there--Kirkup the
necromancer--A miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The
mysterious touch--An indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was
left--Providence takes very long views

XIX

Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle creature--The
most beautiful woman in the world--Better friends than ever--A shadow
brooded--Boys are whole-souled creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam,
Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New
England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of mishaps--My
father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the fourth, death--Havre,
Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool

ILLUSTRATIONS

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
(From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)

BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT
SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS

HERMAN MELVILLE

JAMES T. FIELDS

THE WAYSIDE
(Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife)

EDWIN P. WHIPPLE

JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND
WILLIAM D. TICKNOR

RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES

ROBERT BROWNING

FRANCIS BANNOCH

REV. WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855

MARIA MITCHELL

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY

PENCIL SKETCHES IN ITALY, BY MRS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

THE MARBLE FAUN

HIRAM POWERS

INTRODUCTION

Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My
father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A
revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and
shadows of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's
life and mine.

The best use we can make of good fortune is to share it with our
fellows. Those to whom good things come by way of inheritance,
however, are often among the latest to comprehend their own advantage;
they suppose it to be the common condition. And no doubt I had nearly
arrived at man's estate before it occurred to me that the lines of few
fishers of men were cast in places so pleasant as mine. I was the son
of a man of high desert, who had such friends as he deserved; and
these companions and admirers of his gave to me in the beginning of my
days a kindly welcome and encouragement generated from their affection
and reverence for him. Without doing a stroke of work for it, I found
myself early in the enjoyment of a principality of good will and
fellowship--a species of freemasonry, I might call it, though the
secret was patent enough--for the rights in which, unaided, I might
have contended my lifetime long in vain. Men and women whose names are
consecrated apart in the dearest thoughts of thousands were familiars
and playmates of my childhood; they supported my youth and bade my
manhood godspeed. But to me, for a long while, the favor of these
gracious giants of mind and character seemed agreeable indeed, but
nothing out of the ordinary; my tacit presumption was that other
children as well as I could if they would walk hand in hand with
Emerson along the village street, seek in the meadows for arrow-heads
with Thoreau, watch Powers thump the brown clay of the "Greek Slave,"
or listen to the voice of Charlotte Cushman, which could sway
assembled thousands, modulate itself to tell stories to the urchin who
leaned, rapt, against her knees. Were human felicity so omnipresent
as a happy child imagines it, what a world would this be!

In time, my misapprehension was corrected, rather, I think, through
the application to it of cold logic than by any rude awakening. I
learned of my riches not by losing them--the giants did not withdraw
their graciousness--but by comparing the lot of others with my own.
And yet, to tell the truth--perhaps I might better leave it untold;
only in these chapters, especially, I will not begin with reserves--to
say truth, then, my world, during my father's lifetime, and afterwards
for I will not say how long, was divided into two natural parts, my
father being one of them, and everybody else the other. Hence I was
led to regard the parties of the latter part, rich or poor, giants or
pygmies, as being, after all, of much the same stature and value. The
brightness (in the boy's estimation) of the paternal figure rendered
distinctions between other brightnesses unimportant. The upshot was,
in short, that I inclined to the opinion that while compassion was
unquestionably due to other children for not having a father like
mine, yet in other respects my condition was not egregiously superior
to theirs. They might not know the Brownings or the Julia Ward Howes;
but then, very likely, the Smiths and the Joneses, whom they did know,
were nearly as good.

After fifty years, of course, such prepossessions yield to experience.
My father was the best friend I ever had, and he will always stand in
my estimation distinct from all other friends and persons; but I can
now recognize that in addition to the immeasurable debt I owe him for
being to me what he was in his own person, he bestowed upon me a
privilege also immeasurable in the hospitality of these shining ones
who were his intimates. Did the gift cost him nothing? Nothing, in one
sense. But, again, what does it cost a man to walk upright and
cleanly during the years of his pilgrimage: to deal justly with all,
and charitably: diligently to cultivate and develop every natural
endowment: always to seek truth, tell it, and vindicate it: to
discharge to the utmost of his ability every duty that was intrusted
to him: to rest content, in the line of his calling, with no work
inferior to his best: to say no word and do no act which, were they
known, might weaken the struggle against temptation of any
fellow-creature? These qualities were the price at which Hawthorne
bought his friends; and in receiving those friends from him, his
children could not but feel that the bequest represented his
unfaltering grasp upon whatever is pure, lofty, and generous in human
life.

Yes, whatever it may cost a man of genius to be all his life a good
man, and to use and develop his genius to the noblest ends only, that
my father's friends cost him, and in that amount am I his debtor; and
the longer I myself live, and the more I see of other men, the higher
and rarer do I esteem the obligation. Moreover, in speaking of his
friends, I was thinking of those who personally knew him; but the
world is full to-day of friends of his who never saw him, to whom his
name is my best and surest introduction. Once, only three years since,
in the remote heart of the Colorado mountains, I chanced to enter the
hut of an aged miner; he sat in a corner of the little family room; on
the wall near his hand was fixed a small bookshelf, filled with a
dozen dog-eared volumes. The man had for years been paralyzed; he
could do little more than to raise to that book-shelf his trembling
hand, and take from it one or other of the volumes. When this
helpless veteran learned my name, he uttered a strange cry, and his
face worked with eager emotion; the wife of his broad-shouldered son
brought me to him in his corner; his old eyes glowed as they perused
me. I could not gather the meaning of his broken, trembling speech;
the young woman interpreted for me. Was I related to the great
Hawthorne? "Yes; I am his son." "His son!" Seldom have I met a gaze
harder to sustain than that which the paralytic bent upon me. Would I
might have worn, for the time being, the countenance of an archangel,
so to fill out the lineaments, drawn during so many lonely years by
his imagination and his reverence, of his ideal writer! "The son of
Hawthorne!" He said no more, save by the strengthless pressure of his
hands upon my own; the woman told me how all the books on the little
shelf were my father's books, and for fifteen years the old man had
read no others. Helpless tears of joy, of gratitude, of wonder ran
down the furrows of his cheeks into his white beard. And how could I
at whom he so gazed help being moved: on that desolate, unknown
mountain-side, far from the world, the name which I had inherited was
loved and honored! One does not get one's privileges for nothing. My
father gave me power to make my way, and cast sunshine on the path;
but he made the path arduous, too!

Be that as it may, I now ask who will to look in my mirror, and see
reflected there some of the figures and the scenes that have made my
life worth living. As I peer into the dark abysm of things gone by,
many places that seemed at first indistinct, grow clearer; but many
more must remain impenetrable. Upon the whole, however, I am
surprised to find how much is still discernible. Nearly a score of
years ago I published, in the shape of a formal biography of Hawthorne
and his wife, the consecutive facts of their lives, and numerous
passages from their journals and correspondence. My aim is different
now; I wish to indite an informal narrative from my own point of view,
as child, youth, and man. There will be gaps in it--involuntary ones;
and others occasioned by the obligation to retain those pictures only
that seem likely to arouse a catholic interest. Yet there will be a
certain intimacy in the story; and some matters which history would
omit as trivial will be here adduced, for the sake of such color and
character as they may contain. I shall not stalk on stilts, or mouth
phrases, but converse comfortably and trustfully as between friends.
If a writing of this kind be not flexible, unpretending, discursive,
it has no right to be at all. Art is not in question, save the minor
art that lives from line to line. Gossip about men, women, and
things--it can amount to little more than that.

In the earlier chapters the dramatis personae and the incidents must
naturally group themselves about the figure of my father; for it was
thus that I saw them. To his boy he was the fountain of love, honor,
and energy; and to the boy he seemed the animating or organizing
principle of other persons and events. With his death, in my
eighteenth year, the world appeared disordered for a season; then,
gradually, I learned to do my own orientation. I was destined to an
experience superficially much more active and varied than his had
been; and it was a world superficially very different from his in
which I moved and dealt There must follow a corresponding modification
in the character of the narrative; yet that, after all is superficial,
too. For the memory of my father has always been with me, and has
doubtless influenced me more than I am myself aware. And certainly but
for him this book would never have been attempted.

I

Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My
mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of
imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile
indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on
Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted
mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr.
Pickwick--My father in l850--The flowered writing-gown, and the ink
butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second
floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my
aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of
the age.

My maternal aunt, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was a very learned
woman, and a great student of history, and teacher of it; and by the
aid of huge, colored charts, done by my uncle Nat Peabody and hung on
the walls of our sitting-room, she labored during some years to teach
me all the leading dates of human history--the charts being designed
according to a novel and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish
memory. But as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates
and in matters mathematical especially; so that I gave her
inexhaustible patience many a sad hour. To this day I cannot tell in
what year was fought the battle of Marathon, or when John signed Magna
Charta; though the battle itself, and the scene of the barons with
menacing brows gathered about John, stood clearly pictured in my
imagination. Dates were arbitrary, and to my memory nothing arbitrary
would stick. Nevertheless, when I am myself constructing a narrative,
whether it be true or fictitious, I am wedded to dates, and cannot be
divorced from them. It must be set down precisely when the events took
place, in what years the dramatis personae were born, and how old they
were when each juncture of their fortunes came to pass. I can no more
dispense with dates than I can talk without consonants; they carry
form, order, and credibility. Or they are like the skeleton which
gives recognizable shape to men and animals. Nothing mortal can get on
without them..

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