Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

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Bailey, the amiable mystical poet, whom my father mildly liked, was
another man my glimpses of whom came at a date much later than this.
He was a small, placid, gently beaming little philosopher, with a
large beard and an oval brow, and though he wrote several things
besides "Festus," they never detached themselves in the public mind
from the general theme of that production. Bailey himself seemed
finally to have recognized this, and he spent his later years (he
lived to a great age) in issuing continually fresh editions of his
book, with expansions and later thoughts, until it got to be a sort of
philosophical library in itself. He appeared in society in order to
give his admirers opportunity to offer up their grateful homage, and
to settle for them all questions relative to the meaning of man and of
religion. No misgivings troubled him; his smile was as an
unintermittent summer noonday. He was accompanied by his wife, with
whom he seemed to be, as Tennyson says, "twinned, like horse's ear and
eye." She relieved him from the embarrassing necessity of saying
illuminative and eulogistic things about himself and his great work.
The book, upon its first publication, was really read by appreciable
numbers of persons; later, I think, "Festus Bailey" came to be, to the
general mind, an amusing kind of appanage of his own work, which was
now taken as read, but ceased to have readers. How happy a little
imperviousness may make a good man!

Tom Taylor, the dramatist, Punch contributor, and society wit, I
remember only as a pale face and a black beard. His wit had something
of a professional tang. There are many like him in club-land and
hanging about the stage; they catch up and remember all the satirical
sayings, the comicalities, and quips that they hear, and they maintain
a sort of factory for the production of puns. Their repartee explodes
like an American boy's string of toy crackers, and involves, to set it
going, no greater intellectual effort. They are not, in their first
state, less intelligent than the common run of men--rather the
contrary; but as soon as they have gone so far as to acquire a
reputation for wit, their output begins to betray that sad,
perfunctory quality which we find in wound-up music-boxes, and that
mechanical rattle makes us forget that they ever had brains. However,
Tom Taylor, with his century of plays and adaptations--among them "Our
American Cousin," which the genius of an actor, if not its own merit,
made memorable--should not be deemed unworthy of the reputation which,
in his time and place, he won. He was at his best when, stimulated by
applause and a good dinner, he portrayed persons and things with a
kind of laughable extravagance, in the mode introduced by Dickens.
Men of his ilk grow more easily in our soil than in the English, and
are much less regarded.

Henry Stevens--"the man of libraries," as my father calls him--was a
New-Englander, born in Vermont; he took betimes to books, came abroad,
and was employed by the British Museum in getting together Americana,
and by various collectors as an agent to procure books, and in these
innocent pursuits his amiable life was passed. He had a pleasing gift
of drollery, which made his companionship acceptable at stag-parties
and in the smoking-room of the clubs, and he had also a fund of
special information on literary subjects which was often of value. I
met him in after-life--twenty-five years after--and age had not
altered him, though, perhaps, custom had somewhat staled his variety.
He was of medium stature, dark haired and bearded. With him was often
seen the egregious Mr. Pecksniff (as Samuel Carter Hall was commonly
known to his acquaintances since the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit
ten years before). Hall was a genuine comedy figure. Such oily and
voluble sanctimoniousness needed no modification to be fitted to
appear before the footlights in satirical drama. He might be called an
ingenuous hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar, so obviously
were the traits indicated innate and organic in him rather than
acquired. Dickens, after all, missed some of the finer shades of the
character; there can be little doubt that Hall was in his own private
contemplation as shining an object of moral perfection as he portrayed
himself before others. His perversity was of the spirit, not of the
letter, and thus escaped his own recognition. His indecency and
falsehood were in his soul, but not in his consciousness; so that he
paraded them at the very moment that he was claiming for himself all
that was their opposite. No one who knew him took him seriously, but
admired the ability of his performance, and so well was he understood
that he did little or no harm beyond the venting of a spite here and
there and the boring of his auditors after the absurdity of him became
tedious. Self-worshippers of the _os-rotundus_ sort are seldom
otherwise mischievous. He may be sufficiently illustrated by two
anecdotes.

They both occurred at a dinner where I was a guest, and Bennoch sat at
the head of the table. Hall sat at Bennoch's left hand, and my place
was next to Hall's. The old gentleman--he was at this period panoplied
in the dignity of a full suit of snow-white hair, and that unctuous
solemnity and simpering self-complacency of visage and demeanor which
were inflamed rather than abated by years--began the evening by
telling in sesquipedalian language a long tale of an alleged adventure
of his with my father, which, inasmuch as there was no point to it,
need not be rehearsed here; but I noticed that Bennoch was for some
reason hugely diverted by it, and found difficulty in keeping his
hilarity within due bounds of decorum, Hall's tone being all the while
of the most earnest gravity. Later I took occasion to ask Bennoch the
secret of his mirth; was the tale a fiction? "Not a bit of it,"
Bennoch replied; "it's every word of it true; but what tickled me was
that it was myself and not Hall who was in the adventure with your
father; but Hall has been telling it this way for twenty years past,
and has long since come to believe that his lie is the truth." So
ended the first lesson.

The second was administered shortly before the company dispersed. Mr.
Hall again got the floor to deliver one of his more formal moral
homilies. "And, my dear friends--my very dear friends," he went on,
resting his finger-ends upon the table, and inclining his body
affectionately towards his auditors, "may I, as an old man--I think
the oldest of any of you here present--conclude by asking your
indulgence for an illustration from the personal experience and custom
of one who may, I think--who at least has ever striven to be, a humble
Christian gentleman--may I, my dear friends, cite this simple example
of what I have been attempting to inculcate from my own personal
practice, and that of my very dear and valued wife, Mrs. Hall? It has
for very many years been our constant habit, before seeking rest at
night, to kneel down together at our bedside, and to implore,
together, the Divine blessing upon the efforts and labors of the
foregoing day. And before offering up that petition to the Throne of
Grace, my friends "--here the orator's voice vibrated a little with
emotion--"we have ever been sedulous to ask each other, and to
question our own hearts, as to whether, during that day, some human
fellow-creature had been made better, or happier, because we had
lived. And very seldom has it happened--very seldom, indeed, my dear
friends, has it happened--that we were unable to say to ourselves, and
to each other, that, during that day, some fellow-creature, if not
more than one, had had cause for thankfulness because we had lived.
And now I will beg of you, my dear friends," added Mr. Hall, producing
his large, white pocket-handkerchief and patting his eyes with it, "to
pardon a personal allusion, made in fulness of heart and brotherly
feeling, and if there be found in it anything calculated to assist any
of you towards a right comprehension of our Christian responsibilities
towards our fellow-man, I entreat that you take it into your hearts
and bosoms, and may it be sanctified unto you. I have done."

This report may be relied upon as substantially accurate, for the
reporter made a note of the apologue and exhortation soon afterwards.
Mrs. Hall, like her husband, was of Irish birth, and an agreeable and
clever woman. They were both born in 1800, and died, she in her
eighty-second, he in his ninetieth year. He remained the same Hall to
the very end of his long chapter, and really, if no one was the better
because he had lived, I don't know that any one was the worse, in the
long run, either; and there have been Pecksniffs of whom as much could
hardly be affirmed. There is, however, an anecdote of Hall which my
father tells, and seems to have credited; if it be true, it would
appear that once at least in his life he could hardly have implored
the Throne of Grace for a blessing on the deeds of the day. "He told
me," writes my father, "(laughing at the folly of the affair, but,
nevertheless, fully appreciating his own chivalry) how he and Charles
Lever, about ten years since, had been on the point of fighting a
duel. The quarrel was made up, however, and they parted good friends,
Lever returning to Ireland, whence Mr. Hall's challenge had summoned
him." I suspect good Mr. Hall must have once more appropriated
somebody else's adventure; it was not in the heat of youth that the
bloody-minded and unchristian episode is supposed to have occurred,
but when Mr. Hall was in his forty-seventh year.

Durham, the sculptor, was a lifelong friend of Bennoch's, and was
often in my father's company, and he manifested a friendly feeling
towards my father's son long afterwards. He was a man of medium
height, compactly built, with slightly curling hair, and a
sympathetic, abstracted expression of countenance. He was at this time
making a bust of Queen Victoria, and he told us that it was contrary
to court etiquette for her Majesty, during these sittings, to address
herself directly to him, or, of course, for him directly to address
her; they must communicate through the medium of the lady-in-waiting.
The Queen, however, said Durham, sometimes broke through this rule,
and so did the sculptor, the democracy of art, it would seem, enabling
them to surmount the obligation to filter through the mind of a third
person all such remarks as they might wish to make to each other.
Durham also said that when the bust was nearly finished the Queen
proposed that a considerable thickness of the clay should be removed
from the model, which was done. The bust, as an ideal work, was
thereby much improved, but the likeness to her Majesty was
correspondingly diminished. Years afterwards I was talking with W. G.
Wills, the painter and dramatist, a delightful Irishman of the most
incorrigibly republican and bohemian type. He had, a little while
before, been giving lessons in painting to the Princess Louise, who
married the Marquis of Lorne, and who was, herself, exceptionally
emancipated for a royal personage. One day, said Wills (telling the
story quite innocently), the Princess was prevented from coming as
usual to his studio, and he received a message from Windsor Castle,
where the Princess and the Queen were staying, from the Queen's
secretary, commanding his presence there to give the Princess her
lesson, and to spend the night. This would be regarded by the ordinary
British subject not only as an order to be instantly and
unhesitatingly obeyed, but as a high honor and distinction. "But the
fact is," said Wills, with his easy smile, "I'd promised to be at my
friend Corkran's reception that evening, and, of course, I couldn't
think of disappointing him; there was no time to write, so I just sent
a telegram to the castle saying I was engaged." Probably English
society history does not contain a parallel to this piece of audacity,
and one would have liked to see the face of the private secretary of
her Majesty when he opened the telegram. But Wills could not be made
to recognize anything singular in the affair.

Commenting in one of his private note-books, at this time, upon the
subject of modern sculpture in general, my father utters one of his
unregenerate opinions. "It seems to me," he says, "time to leave off
sculpturing men and women naked; such statues mean nothing, and might
as well bear one name as another; they belong to the same category as
the ideal portraits in books of beauty or in the windows of
print-shops. The art does not naturally belong to this age, and the
exercise of it, I think, had better be confined to manufacture of
marble fireplaces." As we shall see, he modified this radical view
before he left Italy; but there is some ground of truth in it,
nevertheless.

Here is another bit of art criticism. He has been giving a detailed
description of the sitting-room in one of our lodgings, and of the
objects contained in it, evidently as a part of his general practice
to record the minor facts of English life, to serve as a background
for the English romance he hoped to write afterwards. "On the
mantle-piece," he writes, "are two little glass vases, and over it a
looking-glass (not flattering to the beholder), and above hangs a
colored view of some lake or seashore, and on each side a cheap
colored print of Prince Albert and one of Queen Victoria. And, really,
I have seen no picture, bust, or statue of her Majesty which I feel to
be so good a likeness as this cheap print. You see the whole line of
Guelphs in it--fair, blue-eyed, shallow-brained, commonplace, yet with
a simple kind of heartiness and truth that make one somewhat
good-natured towards them."

"I must see Dickens before I leave England," he wrote, commenting upon
the various tales he heard of him from henchmen and critics; but he
never did see him, nor Thackeray either, whom he perhaps wished still
more to meet. Thackeray visited America while we were abroad; and when
Dickens came to Boston to read, my father was dead. Nor did he see
Bulwer, an apostrophe by whom he quotes: "Oh, that somebody would
invent a new sin, that I might go in for it!" Tennyson he saw, but did
not speak with him. He sat at table, on one occasion, with Macaulay,
and remarked upon the superiority over his portraits of his actual
appearance. He made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship,
in Italy, of Robert Browning and his wife, and of Coventry Patmore,
the author of "The Angel in the House," a poem which he greatly liked.
But, upon the whole, he came in contact with the higher class of
literary men in England less than with others, whom he was less likely
to find sympathetic.

One afternoon, when I had accompanied him to the consulate, there
entered a tall, active man, very well dressed, with black,
thick-curling hair and keen, blue eyes. He seemed under thirty years
of age, but had the self-confident manner of a man of the world, and a
great briskness of demeanor and speech. He sat down and began to tell
of his experiences; he had been all over the world, and knew
everything about the world's affairs, even the secrets of courts and
the coming movements of international politics. He was a striking,
handsome, indomitable figure, and aggressively American. When he went
away, he left with my father a book which he had written, with an
engraved portrait of the author for frontispiece. This volume, faded
and shelf-worn, but apparently unread, bound in the execrable taste of
a generation and a half ago, I recently found among my father's
volumes. It bore on the title-page the dashing signature of George
Francis Train. Train saw things in the large--in their cosmic
relations; from us he was going forth to make a fortune compared with
which that of Monte Cristo would be a trifle. He did make fortunes, I
believe; but there seems to have been in his blood a little too much
of the elixir of life--more than he could thoroughly digest. His
development was arrested, or was continued on lines which carried him
away from practical contact with that world which he believed he held
in the hollow of his hand. My father suspected his soundness; but in
1856 there seemed to be no height to which he might not rise. The
spiritual steam-engine in him, however, somehow got uncoupled from the
mass of the machinery of human affairs, and has been plying in vacua,
so to say, ever since. On the 9th of June came a telegram from
Southampton; my mother and sisters had arrived from Madeira. My father
and I left Liverpool the next day, feeling that our troubles were
over. In the afternoon we alighted at the little seaport and took a
cab to the Castle Hotel, close to the water. My father, with a face
full of light, sprang up-stairs to the room in which my mother awaited
him; I found myself with my sisters and Fannie Wrigley, the faithful
nurse and companion who had accompanied them on their travels. How
tall and mature Una was! What a big girl baby Rose had become! There
was a little strangeness between us, but great good-will; we felt that
there were a great many explanations to be made. In a few minutes I
was called up-stairs to my mother. At the first glance she seemed
smaller than formerly; her face appeared a little different from my
memory of it; I was overcome by an odd shyness. She smiled and held
out her arms; then I saw my beloved mother, and a great passion of
affection poured through me and swept me to her. I was whole again,
and indescribably happy.

There was never such another heavenly room as that parlor in the
Castle Hotel; never another hotel so delightful, or another town to be
compared with Southampton. I was united to all I loved there, and in
my thoughts 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.

We spent our first reunited week at the Castle Hotel, which was
founded on an ancient castle wall, or part of it; traces of it were
shown to guests. The harbor lapped the sea-wall in front; the Isle of
Wight, white-ramparted, gleamed through the haze in the offing. I
suppose, during that week, we were enough employed in telling one
another our histories during our separation; and naturally that of my
mother and sisters filled the larger space. They had brought home
words and phrases in a foreign tongue, which made me feel very
ignorant; they had talked familiarly with kings and queens; they had
had exciting experiences in Madeira; they brought with them
photographs and colored prints of people and places, unlike anything
that I had seen. My mother, who was an unsurpassed narrator of events,
gave us wonderful and vivid accounts of all they had seen and done,
which I so completely assimilated that to this day I could repeat a
great deal of them; my father listened with eyes like stars (as my
mother would have said), and with a smile in the corners of his mouth.
It was glorious weather all the time, or so it seems to have been to
me. My sisters and I renewed our acquaintance, and found one another
none the worse. Nobody called on us except a Mrs. Hume, with whom a
stay of a fortnight was projected; she kept a girls' school, and, this
being vacation, she would take us as boarders. We were starved there,
as only a pinching, English, thin-bread-and-butter housekeeper can
starve people; and my sisters and I had for our playmate a half-witted
girl who was staying over the vacation, and who giggled all the time.
Mrs. Hume had aroused my enthusiasm by telling me that there were
endless sea-anemones along the coast; but Providence seemed hostile to
my sea-anemone proclivities; for it turned out that what Mrs. Hume
understood by sea-anemones was a small, white-flowering weed that grew
on the low bluff beside the water. I never told her my disappointment,
imagining that it would distress her; but it gnawed me terribly, and
she did not merit such forbearance.

We would much better have stayed at the hotel, only that they charged
us fourteen dollars a day, which was considered exorbitant in those
days. There were seven of us, including Fanny, the nurse. What an
age, when two dollars a head was exorbitant! What Mrs. Hume charged us
I know not, but it is only just to admit that it must have been a good
deal less than one hundred dollars a week; though, again, it must not
be forgotten that translucent bread-and-butter is not expensive. We
were sent there, I suppose, in order to remind us that this was still
the world that we were living in, after all, and not yet Paradise. We
came out from her sobered and chastened, but cheerful still; and
meanwhile we visited Stonehenge and other local things of beauty or
interest. Then Mr. Bennoch (who, to tell the truth, had introduced
Mrs. Hume to us) invited us to spend a month at his house in
Blackheath, while he and his wife were making a little tour in
Germany, and we arrived at this agreeable refuge during the first half
of July. My father records that he was as happy there as he had ever
been since leaving his native land. It was a pleasant little house, in
a semi-countrified spot, and it contained, besides the usual furniture
proper to an English gentleman and his wife of moderate fortune, a
little Scotch terrier named Towsey, who commanded much of the
attention of us children, and one day inadvertently bit my thumb; and
I carry the scar, for remembrance, to this day.

Many well-known persons passed across our stage here; and London, with
all its wonders, was at our doors, the wide expanse of its
smoke-piercing towers visible in our distance. All the while my father
kept the official part of himself at Liverpool, where his consular
duties still claimed his attention; he went and came between Mrs.
Blodgett's and Black-heath. The popularity of the incomparable
boarding-house in Duke Street had continued to increase, and he was
obliged to bestow himself in a small room at the back of the building,
which was reputed to be haunted by the spirit of one of his
predecessors in office, who had not only died in it, but had often
experienced there the terrors of delirium tremens; but the ghost,
perhaps from a sentiment of diplomatic etiquette, never showed itself
to my father. Or it may have been that the real self of him being in
Blackheath, what remained was not sufficient to be conscious of a
spiritual presence. He came and went, like sunlight on a partly
cloudy day. I recollect taking a walk over the Heath at evening with
him and the doctor who was attending my mother; Mr. Bennoch was with
us; it must have been just before he and his wife went to the
Continent. After walking some distance (the gentlemen chatting
together, and I gambolling on ahead) we came to the summit of a low
rise, from which we beheld London, flung out, all its gloomy length,
before us; and in all my thoughts of London as a physical entity the
impression then received of it returns to me. It lay vast, low, and
obscure in front of the dull red of the sunset, with dim lights
twinkling dispersedly throughout it, and the dome of St. Paul's
doubtfully defining itself above the level. There is no other general
view of London to be compared with this, seen under those conditions.
Soon after, we came to some ridges and mounds, which, said Bennoch,
marked the place where were buried the heaps of the slain of some
great prehistoric battle--one, at least, which must have taken place
while the Romans yet ruled Britain. It was a noble scene for such an
antique conflict, when man met man, foot to foot and hand to hand,
with sword and spear. My mind was full of King Arthur and his
Round-Table knights of the Pendragonship, and I doubted not that their
mightiest fight had been fought here.

There were many walks in London itself. One day, going west along the
Strand, we found ourselves drawn into the midst of a vast crowd near
Charing Cross; some royal function was in progress. Threading our way
slowly through the press, we saw a troop of horsemen in steel
breastplates, with nodding plumes on their helmets, and drawn swords
carried upright on their thighs--the famous Horse Guards; and farther
on we began to see carriages with highly ornamental coachmen and
footmen passing in dilatory procession; within them were glimpses of
ladies in low-necked dresses, feathers in their hair, and their necks
sparkling with jewels.

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