Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

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But Lenox could not be a home for us. It was, indeed, a paradise for
the children; but the children's father was never well there. He had a
succession of colds--as those affections are called; it was ascribed
to the variations of temperature during the summers; but the
temperature would not have troubled him had he not been hard hit
before he went to Berkshire. He got out of patience with the climate,
and was wont to anathematize it with humorous extravagance, as his way
was: "It is horrible. One knows not for ten minutes together whether
he is too cool or too warm. I detest it! I hate Berkshire with my
whole soul. Here, where I had hoped for perfect health, I have for the
first time been made sensible that I cannot with impunity encounter
nature in all her moods." It was the summers that disagreed with him.
"Upon the whole," he said, "I think that the best time for living in
the country is the winter." It was during the winter that he did most
of his writing. The House of the Seven Gables was written between
September of 1850 and January or February of 1851.

But composition took more out of him than formerly. He admitted to
his sister Louisa that he was "a little worn down with constant work,"
and added that he could not afford any idle time now, being evidently
of the opinion that his popularity would be short-lived, and that it
behooved him, therefore, to make the most of it. But "the pen is so
constantly in my fingers that I abominate the sight of it!" he
exclaimed. This was after he had transgressed his custom of never
writing in the hot months. He began in June and finished in forty days
the whole volume of The Wonder-Book. He also read the tales to his
domestic audience as fast as they were written, and benefited,
perhaps, by the expert criticism of the small people. Many passages in
the intercalated chapters, describing the adventures of Eustace Bright
and the Tangle-wood children, are based on facts well known to his own
two youngsters. And when Eustace tells his hearers that if the
dark-haired man dwelling in the cottage yonder were simply to put some
sheets of writing-paper in the fire, all of them and Tangle-wood
itself would turn into cinders and vanish in smoke up the
chimney--even the present chronicler saw the point; though, at the
same time, he somehow could not help believing in the reality of
Primrose, Buttercup, Dandelion, Squash-blossom, and the rest. Thus
early did he begin to grasp the philosophy of the truth of fiction.

The House of the Seven Gables and The Wonder-Book were a fair
eighteen-months' work, and in addition to them Hawthorne had, before
leaving Lenox, planned out the story of The Blithedale Romance; so
that after we got to West Newton--our half-way station on the road to
Concord--he was prepared to sit down and write it. Long before we left
Concord for England he had published Tangle-wood Tales, not to mention
the biography of Franklin Pierce. Una and her brother knew nothing
about the romances; they knew and approved the fairy tales; but their
feeling about all their father's writings was, that he was being
wasted in his study, when he might be with them, and there could be
nothing in any books, whether his own or other authors', that could
for a moment bear comparison with his actual companionship. What he
set down upon the page was but a less free and rich version of the
things that came from his living mouth in our heedless playtimes. "If
only papa wouldn't write, how nice it would be!" And, indeed, a book
is but a poor substitute for the mind and heart of a man, and it
exists only as one of the numberless sorry makeshifts to which time
constrains us, while we are waiting for eternity and full communion.

It was a dreary day in the beginning of the second winter that we set
out on our eastward journey; but Hawthorne's face was brighter than
the weather warranted, for it was turned once more towards the sea. We
were destined, ere we turned back, to go much farther towards the
rising sun than any of us then suspected. We took with us one who had
not been present at our coming--a little auburn-haired baby, born in
May. Which are the happiest years of a man's life? Those in which he
is too much occupied with present felicity to look either forward or
backward--to hope or to remember. There are no such years; but such
moments there may be, and perhaps there were as many such moments
awaiting Hawthorne as had already passed.

His greatest work was done before he left his native land, and within
a year or two of his death he wrote to Richard Stoddard: "I have been
a happy man, and yet I cannot remember any moment of such happy
conspiring circumstances that I would have rung a joy-bell at it."

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 aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances
of "The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President"--The most homeless
people in the world."

The sky that overhung Hawthorne's departure from Lenox was gray with
impending snow, and the flakes had begun to fall ere the vehicle in
which his family was ensconced had reached the railway station in
Pittsfield. Travel had few amenities in those days. The cars were all
plain cars, with nothing to recommend them except that they went
tolerably fast--from twenty to thirty miles an hour. They were
chariots of delight to the children, who were especially happy in
occupying the last car of the train, from the rear windows of which
they could look down upon the tracks, which seemed to slide
miraculously away from beneath them. The conductor collected the
tickets--a mysterious rite. The gradually whitening landscape fled
past, becoming ever more level as we proceeded; by-and-by there was a
welcome unpacking of the luncheon-basket, and all the while there were
the endless questions to be asked and faithfully answered. It was
already dark by the time we were bundled out at the grimy shed which
was called the depot, at West Newton, where we were met by the Horace
Manns, and somehow the transit to the latter's house, which we were to
occupy for the winter, was made. The scene was gloomy and unpleasant;
the change from the mountains of the west depressing; and, for my
part, I cannot remember anything agreeable in this raw little suburb.
American life half a century ago had a great deal of rawness about it,
and its external aspect was ugly beyond present belief. We may be a
less virtuous nation now than we were then, but we are indescribably
more good to look at. And the West Newton of to-day, as compared with
that of 1851, will serve for an illustration of this truth.

Horace Mann's house was a small frame dwelling, painted white, with
green blinds, and furnished with a furnace stiflingly hot. One of the
first things the baby did was to crawl under the sofa in the
sitting-room and lay her small fingers against the radiator or
register, or whatever it is called, through which the heat came. She
withdrew them with a bitter outcry, and on the tip of each was a
blister as big as the tip itself. We had no glorious out-door
playground in West Newton; it was a matter of back yards and sullen
streets. The snow kept piling up, week after week; but there was no
opportunity to put it to its proper use of coasting. The only
redeeming feature of the physical situation that I recall is the
momentous fact of a first pair of red-topped boots. They were very
uncomfortable, and always either wet or stiff as iron from
over-dryness; but they made their wearer as happy as they have made
all other boys since boots began. A boy of six with high boots is
bigger than most men.

But if the outward life was on the whole unprepossessing, inward
succulence was not lacking. We had the Manns, to begin with, and the
first real acquaintance between the two sets of children opened here.
Mary Peabody, my mother's elder sister, had married Horace Mann, whose
name is honorably identified with the development in this country of
common-school education. They had three children, of about our age,
all boys. A statue in bronze of Horace Mann stands in front of the
State-house in Boston, and the memory of the strenuous reformer well
merits the distinction. He took things seriously and rather grimly,
and was always emphatically in earnest. He was a friend of George
Combe, the phrenologist, after whom his second boy was named; and he
was himself so ardent a believer in the new science that when his
younger son, Benjamin, was submitted to him for criticism at a very
early age he declared, after a strict phrenological examination, that
he was not worth bringing up. But children's heads sometimes undergo
strange transformations as they grow up, and Benjamin lived to refute
abundantly his father's too hasty conclusion in his case. He became
eminent as an entomologist; George followed the example of his father
on educational lines. Horace, who died comparatively early, was an
enthusiastic naturalist, who received the unstinted praise and
confidence of the great Agassiz. My uncle Horace, as I remember him,
was a very tall man, of somewhat meagre build, a chronic sufferer from
headaches and dyspepsia. His hair was sandy, straight, rather long,
and very thick; it hung down uncompromisingly round his head. His face
was a long square, with a mouth and chin large and immitigably firm.
His eyes were reinforced by a glistening pair of gold-bowed
spectacles. He always wore a long-skirted black coat. His aspect was a
little intimidating to small people; but there were lovely qualities
in his nature, his character was touchingly noble and generous, and
the world knows the worth of his intellect. He was anxious, exacting,
and dogmatic, and was not always able to concede that persons who
differed from him in opinion could be morally normal. This was
especially noticeable when the topic of abolition happened to come up
for discussion; Horace Mann was ready to out-Garrison Garrison; he
thought Uncle Tom's Cabin a somewhat milk-and-water tract. He was
convinced that Tophet was the future home of all slave-holders, and
really too good for them, and he practically worshipped the negro. Had
he occupied a seat in Congress at that juncture, it is likely that the
civil war might have been started a decade sooner than it was. My
father and mother were much more moderate in their view of the
situation, and my mother used to say that if slavery was really so
evil and demoralizing a thing as the abolitionists asserted, it was
singular that they should canonize all the subjects of the
institution. But, as a rule, all controversy with the indignant zeal
of our relative was avoided; in his eyes any approach to a
philosophical attitude on the burning question was a crime. Nor were
his convictions less pronounced on the subject of total abstinence
from liquor and tobacco. Now, my father smoked an occasional cigar,
and it once came about that he was led to mention the fact in Horace
Mann's hearing. The reformer's bristles were set in a moment. "Do I
understand you to say, Mr. Hawthorne, that you actually use tobacco?"
"Yes, I smoke a cigar once in a while," replied my father,
comfortably. Horace Mann could not keep his seat; he started up and
paced the room menacingly. He had a high admiration for my father's
genius, and a deep affection for him as a man, and this infidelity to
the true faith seemed to him the more appalling. But he would be true
to his colors at all costs, and after a few moments he planted
himself, tall and tragic, before his interlocutor, and spoke, in a
husky voice, to this effect: "Then, Mr. Hawthorne, it is my duty to
tell you that I no longer have the same respect for you that I have
had." Then he turned and strode from the room, leaving the
excommunicated one to his reflections. Faithful are the wounds of a
friend, and my father was as much touched as he was amused by this
example of my uncle's candor. Of course, there was a great vacuum in
the place where my uncle's sense of humor might have been; but there
are a time and place for such men as he, and more than once the men
without sense of humor have moved the world.

In addition to the Manns, there were visitors--the succession of whom,
indeed, was henceforth to continue till the end of my father's earthly
pilgrimage. Among the earliest to arrive was Grace Greenwood, wading
energetically to our door through the December snow. She was one of
the first, if not the first, of the tribe of women correspondents; she
had lately returned, I think, from England, and the volume of her
letters from that strange country was in everybody's hands. She was
then a young woman, large and handsome, with dark hair and complexion,
and large, expressive eyes, harmonious, aquiline features, and a
picturesque appearance. She wore her hair in abundant curls; she
exhaled an atmosphere of romance, of graceful and ardent emotions, and
of almost overpowering sentiment. In fact, she had a genuine gift for
expression and description, and she made an impression in contemporary
letters. We might smile now--and, in truth, we sometimes did
then--over some of her pages; but much of her work would still be
called good, if resuscitated from the dusty book-shelves of the past.
I remember one passage in her English Letters which was often quoted
in our family circle as a typical illustration of the intensity of the
period: "The first tears," wrote Grace, "that I had shed since leaving
my dear native land fell fast into the red heart of an English rose!"
Nothing could be better than that; but the volume was full of similar
felicities. You were swimming in radiant tides of enthusiastic
appreciation, quotations from the poets and poetical rhapsodies;
incidents of travel, humorous, pathetic, and graphic; swirling eddies
of word-painting, of moral and ethical and historical reflection;
withal, an immense, amiable, innocent, sprawling temperament. And as
was her book, so was Grace herself; indeed, if any one could outdo the
book in personal conversation, Grace was that happy individual. What
she accomplished when she embarked, full-sailed, upon the topic of The
Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may be pictured to
themselves by persons endowed with the rudiments of imagination; I
must not attempt to adorn this sober page with an attempted
reproduction of the scene. Mortal language reeled and cracked under
the strain of giving form to her admiration; but it was so honest and
well meant that it could not but give pleasure even in the midst of
bewilderment. My father bowed his head with a painful smile; but I
dare say it did him good when the ordeal was over.

At this time the reverberations of the European revolutionary year,
1848, were still breaking upon our shores. President Polk had given
mortal offence to Austria by sending over a special commissioner to
determine whether the seceding state of Hungary might be recognized as
a belligerent. In 1850 the Austrian representative, Baron Huelsmann,
had entered upon a correspondence with our own Daniel Webster. The
baron remonstrated, and Daniel mounted upon the national bird and
soared in the patriotic empyrean. The eloquence of the Secretary of
State perhaps aroused unwarranted expectations in the breasts of the
struggling revolutionists, and the Hungarian man of eloquence set out
for the United States to take the occasion by the forelock. Not since
the visit of Lafayette had any foreigner been received here with such
testimonials of public enthusiasm, or listened to by such applausive
audiences: certainly none had ever been sent home again with less wool
to show for so much cry. In 1851, the name of Kossuth was the most
popular in the country, and when it was learned that he had accepted
an invitation to speak in our little West Newton, we felt as if we
were almost embarked upon a campaign--upon an altruistic campaign of
emancipation against the Hapsburg oppressor. The excitement was not
confined to persons of mature age and understanding; it raged among
the smaller fry, and every boy was a champion of Kossuth. The train
conveying the hero from New York to Boston (whence he was to return to
West Newton after the reception there) was timed to pass through our
midst at three o 'clock in the afternoon, and our entire population
was at the track-side to see it go by. After one or two false alarms
it came in sight round the curve, the smokestack of the engine swathed
in voluminous folds of Old Glory. The smoke-stacks of those days were
not like our scientific present-day ones; they were huge, inverted
cones, affording ample surface for decoration. The train did not stop
at our station; but Kossuth no doubt looked out of the window as he
flew past and bowed his acknowledgments of our cheers. He was to
return to us the next day, and, meanwhile, the town-hall, or the
church, or whatever building it was that was to be the scene of his
West Newton triumph was put in order for his reception. The person who
writes these words, whose ears had eagerly devoured the story of the
Hungarian revolt, wished to give the august visitor some personal
assurance of his distinguished consideration, and it was finally
agreed by his indulgent parents that he should print upon a card the
legend, "GOD BLESS YOU, KOSSUTH," and be afforded an opportunity
personally to present it to the guest of the nation. Many cards had
been used and cast aside before the scribe, his fingers tremulous with
emotion, had produced something which the Hungarian might be
reasonably expected to find legible. Then, supported by his father and
mother, and with his uncles, aunts, and cousins doubtless not far off,
he proceeded proudly but falteringly to the scene of the presentation.
He dimly recalls a large interior space, profusely decorated with
stars and stripes, and also the colors of Hungary. At the head of the
room was a great placard with "WELCOME, KOSSUTH" inscribed upon it.
There was a great throng and press of men and women, a subdued,
omnipresent roar of talk, and a setting of the tide towards the place
where the patriot stood to receive our personal greetings. The scribe
whom I have mentioned, being as yet brief of stature, was unable to
see anything except coat-tails and petticoats, until of a sudden there
was a breaking away of these obstacles and he found himself in close
proximity to a gentleman of medium height, strongly built, with a mop
of dark hair framing a handsome, pale, smiling face, the lower parts
of which were concealed by a thick brown beard. It was Kossuth, and
there was that in his countenance and expression which satisfied all
the dreams of his admirer. He was chatting and shaking hands with the
elder persons; and in a minute we were moving on again, and the
printed card, for which the whole function had been created, had not
been presented. At the last moment, in an agony of apprehension, the
boy pulled at his mother's skirt and whispered piteously, "But my
card!" She heard and remembered; but need was for haste; we had
already passed the vantage-point. She snatched it from the tightly
gripping fingers of the bearer, handed it to Kossuth, and at the same
moment, with a gesture, directed his attention to her small companion.
The Hungarian read the inscription at a glance, looked me in the eyes
with a quick smile of comprehension, and, stepping towards me, laid
his hand upon my head. It was a great moment for me; but as I went
away I suddenly dissolved in tears, whether from the reaction of
emotion, or because I had not myself succeeded in delivering my gift,
I cannot now determine. But Kossuth thereby became, and for years he
continued to be, the most superb figure in my political horizon.

All this while The Blithedale Romance was being written. Inasmuch as
it was finished on the last day of April, 1852, it could not have
occupied the writer more than five months in the composition. Winter
was his best time for literary work, and there was winter enough that
year in West Newton. In the middle of April came the heaviest
snowstorm of the season. Brook Farm (modified in certain respects to
suit the conditions) was the scene of the story, and Brook Farm was
within a fair walk of West Newton. I visited the place some thirty
years later, and found the general topographical features
substantially as described in the book. In 1852 it was ten years since
Hawthorne had lived there, and though he might have renewed his
acquaintance with it while the writing was going on, there is no
record of his having done so; and considering the unfavorable weather,
and the fact that the imaginative atmosphere which writers seek is
enhanced by distance in time, just as the physical effect of a
landscape is improved by distance of space, makes it improbable that
he availed himself of the opportunity. His note-books contain but few
comments upon the routine of life of the community; his letters to his
wife (then Sophia Peabody) are somewhat fuller; one can trace several
of these passages, artistically metamorphosed, in the romance. The
episode of the masquerade picnic is based on fact, and the scene of
the recovery of Zenobia's body from the river is a tolerably close
reproduction of an event in Concord, in which, several years before,
Hawthorne had been an actor.

The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the
hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox;
there are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the
stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the
glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a
passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the
groundwork for Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and
battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a
thin face and a red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half
drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a
stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody but fixing his one moist
eye on you with a certain intentness. He is a man who has been in
decent circumstances at some former period of his life, but, falling
into decay, he now haunts about the place, as a ghost haunts the spot
where he was murdered. The word ragamuffin," he adds, with
characteristic determination to be exact, "does not accurately express
the man, because there is a sort of shadow or delusion of
respectability about him, and a sobriety, too, and a kind of dignity
in his groggy and red-nosed destitution." Out of this subtle
correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old
Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy.
But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage,
likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Parker's
liquor-bar) where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because,
striking though it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping
with the rest of the fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit
upon such a simile, would have had conscience and self-denial enough,
not to mention fine enough artistic sense, to delete it!

The craftsman's workmanship may occasionally be traced in this way;
but, as a rule, it is difficult to catch a glimpse of him in his
creative moments. If he made rough draughts of his stories, he must
have destroyed them after the stories themselves were completed; for
none such, in the case of his finished products, was left. I have seen
the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was
destroyed by James T. Fields's printers--Fields having at that time no
notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the value that
would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing. All the extant
manuscripts are singularly free from erasures and interlineations;
page after page is clear as a page of print. He would seem to have
taught himself so thoroughly how to write that, by the time the series
of his longer romances began, he was able to say what he wished to say
at a first attempt. He had the habit, undoubtedly, of planning out the
work of each day on the day previous, generally while walking in
solitude either out-of-doors or, if that were impracticable, up and
down the floor of his study. It was this habit which created the
pathway along the summit of the ridge of the hill at Wayside, in
Concord; it was a deeply trodden path, in the hard, root-inwoven soil,
hardly nine inches wide and about two hundred and fifty yards in
length. The monotonous movement of walking seemed to put his mind in
the receptive state favorable for hearing the voices of imagination.
The external faculties were quiescent, the veil of matter was lifted,
and he was able to peruse the vision beyond.

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