Books: Hawthorne and His Circle

J >> Julian Hawthorne >> Hawthorne and His Circle

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22

Among many visitors came Richard Henry Stoddard, already a poet, but
anxious to supplement the income from his verses by a regular stipend
from the big pocket of Uncle Sam. His first coming was in summer, and
he and my father went up on the hill and sat in the summer-house
there, looking out upon the wide prospect of green meadows and distant
woods, but probably seeing nothing of them, their attention being
withdrawn to scenes yet fairer in the land of imagination and memory.
Stoddard was then, as always, a handsome man, strong and stanch,
black-haired and black-bearded, with strong eyes that could look both
fierce and tender. He was masculine, sensitive, frank, and humorous;
his chuckle had infinite merriment in it; but, as his mood shifted,
there might be tears in his eyes the next moment. He was at that time
little more than five-and-twenty years old, and he looked hardly that;
he was a New England country youth of genius. Nature had kindled a
fire in him which has never gone out. Like my father, he was
affiliated with the sea, and had its freshness and daring, though
combined with great modesty, and he felt honored by the affection with
which he inspired the author of The Scarlet Letter. It was not until
his second visit, in the winter, that the subject of a custom-house
appointment for him came up; for my father, being known as a close
friend of the President, whose biography he had written for the
campaign, became the object of pilgrimages other than literary ones.
He received sound advice, and introductions, which aided him in
getting the appointment, and he held it for nearly twenty years--more
to the benefit of the custom-house than of poetry, no doubt, though he
never let poetry escape him, and he is to-day a mine of knowledge and
wisdom on literary subjects. There is an immense human ardor, power,
and pathos in Stoddard; better than any other American poet does he
realize the conception of his great English brother--the love of love,
the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn. The world has proved impotent to
corrupt his heroic simplicity; he loved fame much, but truth more. He
is a boy in his heart still, and he has sung songs which touch
whatever is sweetest, tenderest, and manliest in the soul of man.

[IMAGE: EDWIN P. WHIFFLE]

E. P. Whipple, essentially a man of letters, and famous in his day as
a critic of literature, appeared often in "The Wayside." His verdict
on a book carried weight; it was an era when literary criticism was
regarded seriously, and volumes devoted to critical studies had
something more than, a perfunctory vogue. He had written penetrating
and cordial things about my father's books, and foretold the high
place which he would ultimately occupy in our Pantheon. He was rich in
the kind of Attic salt which, was characteristic of Boston in the
middle century; the product of an almost excessive culture erected on
sound, native brains. He had abounding wit; not only wit of the sort
that begets mirth, but that larger and graver wit which Macaulay
notices in Bacon's writings--a pure, irradiating, intellectual light.
It had often the effect of an actual physical illumination cast upon
the topic. He was magnificent as a dinner-table companion. He was
rather a short, thick-shouldered man, with a big head on a short neck,
a broad, projecting forehead, prominent eyes, defended by shiny
spectacles, and bushy whiskers. He is not remembered now, probably
because he never produced any organic work commensurate with his huge
talent. Analyses of the work of others, however just, useful, and
creative, do not endure unless they are associated with writing of the
independent sort. Whipple, with all his ability and insight, never
entered the imaginative field on his own account, and in the press of
wits he falls behind and is forgotten.

My father had come to Concord with the idea of a new romance in his
mind; he designed it to be of a character more cheerful than the
foregoing ones. It was never written, and but the slightest traces of
what it might have been are extant. Herman Melville had spent a day
with us at Concord, and he had suggested a story to Hawthorne; but the
latter, after turning it over in his mind, came to the conclusion that
Melville could treat the subject better than he could; but Melville
finally relinquished it also. It seems likely, however, that this
projected tale was not the one which Hawthorne had originally been
meditating. At all events, it was postponed in favor of a new book of
wonder-stories from Greek mythology--the first one having had.
immediate popularity, and by the time this was finished, the occasion
had arrived which led to the writing of Pierce's biography. This, in
turn, was followed by the offer by the President to his friend of the
Liverpool consulate, then the most lucrative appointment in the gift
of the administration; and Hawthorne's acceptance of it caused all
literary projects to be indefinitely abandoned.

But even had there been time for the writing of another book, the
death of Hawthorne's sister Louisa would doubtless have unfitted him
for a while from undertaking it. This was the most painful episode
connected with his life; Louisa was a passenger on a Hudson River
steamboat which was burned. She was a gentle, rather fragile woman,
with a playful humor and a lovable nature; she had not the
intellectual force either of her brother or of her sister Elizabeth;
but her social inclinations were stronger than theirs. She was a
delightful person to have in the house, and her nephew and niece were
ardently in love with her. She was on her way to "The Wayside" when
the calamity occurred, and we were actually expecting her on the day
she perished. Standing on the blazing deck, with the panic and the
death-scenes around her, the gentle woman had to make the terrible
choice between the river and the fire. She was alone; there was none
to advise or help her or be her companion in inevitable death. Her
thoughts must have gone to her brother, with his strength and courage,
his skill as a swimmer; but he was far away, unconscious of her
desperate extremity. She had to choose, and the river was her choice.
With that tragic conception of the drowning of Zenobia fresh in his
mind, the realization of his sister's fate must have gained additional
poignancy in my father's imagination. He was hard hit, and the traces
of the blow were manifest on him. After about a month, he made a
journey to the Isles of Shoals with Franklin Pierce, and in that
breezy outpost of the land he spent some weeks, much to his advantage.
This was in the autumn of 1852, and I recall well enough the gap in
things which his long absence made for me, and my perfect joy when the
whistle of the train at the distant railway station signalled his
return. Twenty minutes had to elapse before the railroad carriage
could bring him to our door; they were long and they were brief, after
the manner of minutes in such circumstances. He came, and there was a
moment of indescribable glory while he leaped from the carriage and
faced the situation on the doorstep of his home. His countenance was
glowing with health and the happiness of home-coming. I thought him,
as I always did, the most beautiful of human beings, by which I do not
mean beautiful in feature, for of that I was not competent to hold an
opinion; but beautiful in the feelings which he aroused in me
beholding him. He was beautiful to be with, to hear, touch, and
experience. Such is the effect of the spiritual sphere of good men,
in whom nature and character are harmonious. My father got his
appointment from Washington in the following March, 1853. His wife had
but one solicitude in leaving America; her mother was aged and in
delicate health, and their parting might be forever in this world. But
a month before the appointment was confirmed, her mother quietly and
painlessly died. It was as if she had wished not to be separated from
her beloved daughter, and had entered into the spiritual state in the
expectation of being nearer to her there than she could be in the
world. My mother always affirmed that she was conscious of her
mother's presence with her on momentous occasions during the remainder
of her own life.

June came; the farewells were said, we were railroaded to Boston,
embarked on the Cunard steamship Niagara, Captain Leitch, and steamed
out of Boston Harbor on a day of cloudlessness and calm. Incoming
vessels, drifting in the smoothness, saluted us with their flags, and
the idle seamen stared at us, leaning over their bulwarks. The last of
the low headlands grew dim and vanished in the golden haze of the
afternoon. "Go away, tiresome old land!" sang out my sister and
myself; but my father, standing beside us, gazing westward with a
serious look, bade us be silent. Two hundred and twenty years had
passed since our first ancestor had sought freedom on those
disappearing shores, and our father was the first of his descendants
to visit the Old Home whence he came. What was to be the outcome? But
the children only felt that the ocean was pleasant and strange, and
they longed to explore it. The future and the past did not concern
them.

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.

The steamship Niagara was, in 1853, a favorable specimen of nautical
architecture; the Cunard Company had then been in existence rather
less than a score of years, and had already established its reputation
for safety and convenience. But, with the exception of the red
smoke-stack with the black ring round the top, there was little
similarity between the boat that took us to England and the mammoths
that do that service for travellers now adays. The Niagara was about
two hundred and fifty feet long, and was propelled by paddle-wheels,
upon the summits of whose curving altitudes we were permitted to climb
in calm weather. The interior decorations were neat and pretty, but
had nothing of the palatial and aesthetic gorgeousness which educates
us in these later ages. The company of passengers was so small that a
single cow, housed in a pen on deck, sufficed for their needs in the
way of milk, and there were still left alive and pecking contentedly
about their coop a number of fowls, after we had eaten all we could of
their brethren at the ten dinners that were served during the voyage.
The crew, from the captain down, were all able seamen, friendly and
companionable, and not so numerous but that it was easy to make their
individual acquaintance. The most engaging friend of the small people
was the carpenter, who had his shop on deck, and from whom I acquired
that passion for the profession which every normal boy ought to have,
and from the practice of which I derived deep enjoyment and many
bloody thumbs and fingers for ten years afterwards.

But we had companionship historically at least more edifying. William
D. Ticknor, the senior partner of my father's publishers, was the only
figure familiar at the outset. He was one of the most amiable of men,
with thick whiskers all round his face and spectacles shining over his
kindly eyes; a sturdy, thick-set personage, active in movement and
genial in conversation. It was James T. Fields who usually made the
trips to England; but on this occasion Fields got no farther than the
wharf, where the last object visible was his comely and smiling
countenance as he waved his adieux. Conspicuous among the group on the
after-deck, as we glided out of the smooth harbor of Boston, was an
urbane and dignified gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age, with a
clean-shaven mouth and chin, finely moulded, and with what Tennyson
would call an educated whisker, short and gray, defining the region in
front of and below his ears. He spoke deliberately, and in language
carefully and yet easily chosen, with intonations singularly distinct
and agreeable, giving its full value to every word. This was our first
native Englishman; no less a personage than Mr. Crampton, in fact,
the British Minister, who was on his way to Halifax. He had fine,
calm, quietly observant eyes, which were pleasantly employed in
contemplating the beauty of that summer seascape--an opalescent ocean,
and islands slumbering in the July haze. Near him stood a light-built,
tall, athletic individual, also obviously English, but thirty years
younger; full, also, of artistic appreciation; this was Field
Talfourd, who was an artist, and many things besides; a man proficient
in all forms of culture. His features were high and refined, and,
without being handsome, irresistibly attractive. He turned out to be
a delightful playmate for the children, and astonished them and the
rest of the company by surprising gymnastic feats in the rigging. The
speech of these two Britishers gave the untravelled American a new
appreciation of the beauty and significance of the English language.
Not all Englishmen speak good English, but when they do, they beggar
eulogy.

[IMAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR]

George Silsbee was likewise of our party; he was an American of the
Brahman type, a child of Cambridge and Boston, a man of means, and an
indefatigable traveller. He had the delicate health and physique of
the American student of those days, when out-door life and games made
no part of our scholastic curricula. He may have been forty years old,
slight and frail, with a thin, clean-shaven face and pallid
complexion, but full of mind and sensibility. We do not heed
travellers now, and I am inclined to think they are less worth heeding
than they used to be. It is so easy to see the world in these latter
days that few persons see it to any purpose even when they go through
the motions of doing so. But to hear George Bradford or Silsbee talk
of England, France, and Italy, in the fifties, was a liberal
education, and I used sometimes to stare fascinated at the boots of
these wayfarers, admiring them for the wondrous places in which they
had trodden. Silsbee travelled with his artistic and historic
consciousness all on board, and had so much to say that he never was
able to say it all.

But to my father himself were accorded the honors of the captain's
table, and for him were fired the salutes of cannon which thundered us
out of Boston Harbor and into Halifax. These compliments, however,
were paid to him not as a man of letters, but as a political
representative of his country, and, let a man be as renowned as he
will on his personal account, he will still find it convenient, in
order to secure smooth and agreeable conditions on his way through the
world, to supplement that distinction with recommendations from the
State Department. Respect for rank is the last infirmity even of
noble republican minds, and it oils the wheels of the progress of
those who possess it. An American widow of my later acquaintance, a
lady of two marriageable daughters and small social pretensions in her
own country, toured Europe with success and distinction, getting all
the best accommodations and profoundest obeisances by the simple
device of placing the word "Lady" before her modest signature in the
hotel registers. She was a lady, of course, and had a right so to
style herself, and if snobbish persons chose to read into the word
more than it literally meant, that was not Mrs. Green's affair.

American commerce still existed in 1853, and the Liverpool consulate
was supposed to have more money in it than any other office in the
gift of the administration. As a matter of fact, several of my
father's predecessors had retired from their tenure of office with
something handsome (pecuniarily speaking) to their credit; whether the
means by which it had been acquired were as handsome is another
question. Be that as it may, Congress, soon after my father's
accession, passed a law cutting down the profits about three-fourths,
and he was obliged to practise the strictest economy during his
residence abroad in order to come home with a few thousand dollars in
his pocket. Nevertheless, the dignity, in the official sense, of this
consular post was considerable, and it brought him, in combination
with his literary fame, a good deal more attention in England than he
well knew what to do with. But, in one way or another, he also made
friends there who remained to the end among the dearest of his life
and more than countervailed all the time and energy wasted on the
Philistines.

The Atlantic, all the way across, with the exception of one brief
emotional disturbance between lunch and dinner-time, wore a smile of
fatuous serenity. The sun shone; the vast pond-surface oilily
undulated, or lay in absolute flatness, or at most defiled under our
eyes in endless squadrons of low-riding crests. My mother, whose last
experience of sea-ways had been the voyage to Cuba, in which the ship
was all but lost in a series of hurricanes, was captivated by this
soft behavior, and enjoyed the whole of it as much, almost, as her
husband, who expanded and drank in delight like a plant in the rain.
But, in truth, these must have been blessed hours for them both.
Behind them lay nearly eleven years of married life, spent in narrow
outward circumstances, lightened only towards the last by the promise
of some relaxation from strain, during which they had found their
happiness in each other, and in the wise and tender care of their
children, and in the converse of chosen friends. They had filled their
minds with knowledge concerning the beauties and interests of foreign
lands, with but a slender expectation of ever beholding them with
bodily sight, but none the less well prepared to understand and
appreciate them should the opportunity arrive. And now, suddenly, it
had arrived, and they were on the way to the regions of their dreams,
with the prospect of comparative affluence added. They had nearly
twelve years of earthly sojourn together before them, the afternoon
sunshine to be clouded a little near the close by the husband's
failing health, but glorified more and more by mutual love, and
enriched with memories of all that had before been unfulfilled
imaginings. This voyage eastward was the space of contemplation
between the two periods, and the balm of its tranquillity well
symbolized the peace of soul and mind with which they awaited what the
horizons were to disclose.

The right way to approach England for the first time is not by the
west coast, but by the south, as Julius Caesar did, beckoned on by the
ghostly, pallid cliffs that seem to lift themselves like battlements
against the invader. It is historically open to question whether there
would have been any Roman occupation, or any Saxon or Norman one
either, for that matter, but for the coquetry of those chalk cliffs.
An adventurer, sighting the low and marshy shores of Lancashire, and
muddying his prows in the yellow waters of the Mersey, would be apt to
think that such a land were a good place to avoid. But the race of
adventurers has long since died out, and their place is occupied by
the wide-flying cormorants of commerce, to whom mud flats and rock
deserts present elysian beauties, provided only there be profit in
them. One kind of imagination has been superseded by another, and both
are necessary to the full exploitation of this remarkable globe that
we inhabit.

But even the level capes of Lancashire were alluring to eyes that saw
England, our venerable mother, loom behind them, with her thousand
years' pageantry of warfare and civilization. The egregious little
island is a thirsty place; the land drinks rain as assiduously as do
its inhabitants beer and other liquors. Heavy mists and clouds
enveloped it as we drew near, and ushered us up the Mersey into a
brown omnipresence of rain. The broad, clear sunshine of the Atlantic
was left behind, and we stood on wet decks and were transported to
sloppy wharfs by means of a rain-sodden and abominably smoking little
tug-boat--as the way was fifty years ago. Liverpool was a gray-stone
labyrinth open to the deluge, and its inhabitants went to and fro with
umbrellas over their heads and black respirators over their mouths,
looking as if such were their normal plight--as, indeed, it was. Much
of this was not needed to quench the enthusiasm of the children. The
Waterloo Hotel, to which, by advice of friends, we were driven, seemed
by its very name to carry out the idea of saturation, which the
activities of nature so insistently conveyed. It was intensely
discomfortable, and though the inside of the hotel was well supplied
with gloomy English comforts, and the solemn meals were administered
with a ceremonious gravity that suggested their being preliminaries to
funerals, yet it was hard to be light-hearted. The open-grate coal
fires were the most welcome feature of this summer season, and no
doubt the wine list offered the best available substitute for
sunlight; but we had not been trained to avail ourselves of it. We
drank water, which certainly appeared an idle proceeding in such a
climate. In Liverpool, however, or in its suburbs, we were to live
for the better part of four years, and we must make the best of it.
And there is in English people, when rightly approached, a steady and
systematic geniality that not only makes handsome amends for their
weather, but also accounts for the otherwise singular fact that the
country is inhabited at all. A people with a smaller fund of interior
warmth could not have endured it. The French talk about conquering
England, but they could not hold it if they did, and it is one of the
standing puzzles of history how the Romans, an Italian race, were able
to maintain themselves under these skies during four centuries. It may
be objected that the present English population is not indigenous to
the island; but they are the survival of the fittest and toughest
selected from many aspirants. Nor can it be doubted that the British
hunger for empire in all parts of the world is due to nothing so much
as to their anxiety to have a plausible pretext for living elsewhere
than at home.

My father took the rain, as he took everything that could not be
helped, philosophically, and it seemed to do him no harm; indeed, his
health was uniformly good all through his English residence. It did
not suit so well my mother, who was constitutionally delicate in the
lungs; she was soon obliged to adopt the English respirator, and
finally was driven to take refuge for the greater part of a year in
Lisbon and Madeira, returning only a little before the departure of
the family for Italy in 1858. But there must have been in him an
ancestral power of resistance still effective after more than two
centuries of transplantation; he grew ruddy and robust while facing
the mist and mirk, and inhaling the smoky moisture that did service
for air. Nor was his health impaired by the long hours in the daily
consulate--a grimy little room barely five paces from end to end, with
its dusty windows so hemmed in by taller buildings that even had there
been any sunshine to make the attempt, it could never have succeeded
in effecting an entrance through them. Here, from ten in the morning
until four in the afternoon, he dealt with all varieties of scamps and
mendicants, fools and desperadoes, and all the tribe of piratical
cutthroats which in those days constituted a large part of the
merchant marine. Calamity, imbecility, and rascality were his constant
companions in that dingy little den; and the gloomy and sooty skies
without but faintly pictured the moral atmosphere which they exhaled;
he entered deeply into all their affairs, projects, and complaints,
feeling their troubles, probably, at least as keenly as they did
themselves, and yet he came out of it all with clear eyes and a sound
digestion. I presume the fact may have been that he unconsciously
regarded the whole affair somewhat as we do a drama in a theatre; it
works upon our sensibilities, and yet we do not believe that it is
real. There was nothing in the experience germane to his proper life;
it could not become a part of him, and therefore its posture towards
him remained inveterately objective. The only feature of it that
quickened a responsive chord in him was the revelation of the
intolerable condition of the sailors in many of our ships, and upon
these abuses he enlarged in his communications to Washington.
Improvements were made in consequence of his remonstrances; but the
American merchant service had already begun its downward career, and
it is only very lately, owing to causes which are too novel and
peculiar to be intelligently discussed as yet, that our flag is once
more promising to compete against that of England.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22