Books: Memories of Hawthorne

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It is well with those who forget themselves in generous interest for
the hopes, possibilities, and spiritual loftiness of human beings all
over the world. Such men may remain poor, may never in life have the
full praise of their fellows; but they could easily give testimony as
to the delights of praise from God,--that which comes to our lips
after little spiritual victories, like spring water on a hot day, and
of which the workers in noble thought or adventure drink so deep.
These representative men, if they cheer their fancy with fair thoughts
of wide public approbation, choose the undying sort, that blooms like
the edelweiss beyond the dust of sudden success. Hawthorne worked hard
and nobly. Not even the mechanic who toils for his family all day, all
week-days of the year, and never swears at wife or child, toils more
nobly than this sensitive, warm-hearted, brave, recluse, much-seeing
man. He teaches the spiritual greatness of the smallest fidelity, and
the spiritual destruction in the most familiar temptations. The
Butterfly which he describes floats everywhere through his pages, and
it is broken wherever the heart of one of his characters breaks, for
there sin has clutched its victim. It floats about us lovingly to
attract our attention to higher things; and I am sure the radiant
delicacy of the winged creature throbbed on a flower near David Swan,
as he slept honestly through the perils of evil.

Every touch of inner meaning that he gives speaks of his affection,
his desire to bring us accounts of what he has learned of God's
benevolence, in his long walks on the thoroughfares and in the byways,
and over the uncontaminated open country, of human hope. Poverty,
trouble, sin, fraudulent begging, stupidity, conceit,--nothing forced
him absolutely to turn away his observation of all these usual rebuffs
to sympathy, if his inconvenience could be made another's gain. But he
was firm with a manliness that was uncringing before insolence, and
did not shrink from speaking home truths that pruned the injurious
branches of the will; yet he never could be insulting, because he had
no selfish end. As a comrade he led to higher perceptions and moods.
The men who chatted with him in the Salem Custom House, the Liverpool
Consulate, and elsewhere, never forgot that he was the most inspiring
man they had known. All this was work. The idle man, lazy in a drunken
carouse, is in a world of his own. His sphere stretches out no
connecting tendrils to the spheres of others; he seems to Us dead in
spirit; he will tell you he believes in no one's true friendship, and
wishes for no companionship; we do not know how to touch his heart,
nor in what language to make him hear when we call,--he is in Mars.
But the sentinel, still as marble, or moving like a well-adjusted
machine that will not defy law--he stirs us by his energy, his
laboring vigilance. His care for others would make him surrender his
life at once. The trusted soldier has left selfishness and cowardice
on the first tenting-ground, and works hard, though he stands
statue-like. It is his business to be of use, and he is never
useless. So with a great artist. He is brother to gentleman or churl.
Hawthorne had not an atom of the poison of contempt. As I have said
before, if he did not love stupidity, he forgave it.

He was fond of using his hands for work, too; and he had skill in
whatever he did. His activity of this manual sort may be inferred from
the fact that when a young man he gradually whittled away one of the
leaves of his writing-table, while musing over his stories. He did not
know, unpleasantly, that he was doing it. What fun he must have had!
Think of the rich scenery of thought that spread about him, the
people, the subtle motives, the eerie truths, the entrancing outlooks
into divine beauty, that entertained him as his sharp blade carved and
sliced his table, which gladly gave itself up to such destruction!
When he was writing "The Scarlet Letter," as Julian's nurse Dora long
delighted to tell, his wife with her dainty care in sewing was making
the little boy a shirt of the finest linen, and was putting in one
sleeve, while the other lay on the table. Dora saw Hawthorne, who was
reading, lay down his book and take up something which he proceeded to
cut into shreds with some small scissors that exactly suited him.

"Where can the little sleeve be which I finished, and wished to sew in
here, my love?" said his blissful wife. Hawthorne (blissfully thinking
of his novel) only half heard the question; but on the table was a
heap of delicate linen shavings, and the new scissors testified over
them.

His jack-knife was a never-ending source of pleasure, and he was
seldom without the impulse, if a good opportunity offered, to subject
a sapling to it for a whistle, or to make some other amusing trifle,
or to cut a bit of licorice with a slow, sure movement that made the
black lump most acceptable.

His mind was never in a stound. It was either observing, or using
observations. Of course he lost his way while walking, and destroyed
commonplace things while musing; and the world hung just so much the
less heavily upon his moving pinions of thought.

His diligence of mind is reported of him at an early age. His sister,
Ebie Hawthorne, gave me a bust of John Wesley, in clerical white bib,
and of a countenance much resembling Alcott's, even to the long,
white, waving hair. Its very aspect cried out, though never so
mercifully, "My sermon is endless!"

Aunt Ebie, hunching her shoulders in mirthful appreciation, said,
"Nathaniel always hated it!"

Why not? At four years of age he had already had enough of Wesley; and
my aunt, with a rejoicing laugh, described how, not being able to
induce his elders to act upon his abhorrence of the melancholy, tinted
object, at last, in dead of winter, he filled it with water through a
hole in the pedestal, which had revealed its hollowness. He then stood
the bust upside down against the wall in a cold place, confidently
awaiting the freezing of the water, in which event it was to be hoped
that the puppet sermonizer would burst, like a pitcher under similar
odds. But John Wesley never burst, to the disgust of a broader mind
and the offended wonder of childish eyes.

CHAPTER XVI

THE LEAVE-TAKING

A few words from a letter of Emerson's to my mother, written after my
father's death, will give a true impression of the friendship which
existed strongly between the two lovers of their race, who, though
they did not have time to meet often, may be said to have been
together through oneness of aim:--

CONCORD, 11th July [1864].

DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--Guests and visitors prevented me from writing
you, last evening, to thank you for your note, and to say how much
pleasure it gives me, that you find succor and refreshment in
sources so pure and lofty. The very selection of his images proves
Behman poet as well as saint, yet a saint first, and poet through
sanctity. It is the true though severe test to put the Teacher to,--to
try if his solitary lessons meet our case. And for these thoughts and
experiences of which you speak, their very confines and approaches
lift us out of the world. I have twice lately proposed to see you, and
once was on my way, and unexpectedly prevented. I have had my own pain
in the loss of your husband. He was always a mine of hope to me, and
I promised myself a rich future in achieving at some day, when we
should both be less engaged to tyrannical studies and habitudes, an
unreserved intercourse with him. I thought I could well wait his time
and mine for what was so well worth waiting. And as he always appeared
to me superior to his own performances, I counted this yet untold
force an insurance of a long life. Though sternly disappointed in the
manner and working, I do not hold the guarantee less real. But I must
use an early hour to come and see you to say more.

R. W. EMERSON.

If my father expected a full renewal of comradeship with American men
of his own circle, and even the deeper pleasure of such friendship in
a maturer prime alluded to by Emerson, circumstances sadly intervened.
The thunderstorm of the war was not the only cause of his retiring
more into himself than he had done in Europe, although he felt that
sorrow heavily. Or perhaps I might say with greater correctness that
when he appeared, it was without the joyous air that he had lately
displayed in England, among his particular friends, when his literary
work was over for the time being after the finishing of "Monte Beni."
I remember that he often attended the dinners of the Saturday Club. A
bill of fare of one of the banquets, but belonging to an early date,
1852, read: "Tremont House. Paran Stevens, Proprietor. Dinner for
Twelve Persons, at three o'clock." A superb menu follows, wherein
canvas-back ducks and madeira testify to the satisfaction felt by the
gentlemen whose names my father penciled in the order in which they
sat; Mr. Emerson, Mr. Clough, Mr. Ellery Channing, Mr. Charles Sumner,
Mr. Theodore Parker, Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Greenough, Mr.
Samuel Ward, and several others making the shining list. His keen care
for the health of his forces induced him to hold back from visits even
to his best friends, if he were very deeply at work, or paying more
rapidly than usual from his capital of physical strength, which had
now begun to sink. Lowell tried to fascinate him out of seclusion, in
the frisky letter given in "A Study of Hawthorne;" but very likely did
not gain his point, since Longfellow and others had infrequent success
in similar attempts.

I chanced to discover the impression my father made upon Dr. Holmes,
as we sat beside each other at a dinner given by the Papyrus Club of
Boston more than fifteen years ago, on ladies' night. That same
evening I dashed down a verbatim account of part of our conversation,
which I will insert here.

He passed his card over to my goblet, and took mine. "That is the
simplest way, is it not?" he asked.

"I was just going to introduce myself," said I. Then Mrs. Elizabeth
Stoddard sat down by me, and I turned to speak with her.

In a moment Dr. Holmes held my card forward again. "Now let me see!"
he said.

"And you don't know who I am, yet?" I asked.

He smiled, gazed at the card through his eyeglasses, and leaned
towards me hesitatingly. "And what _was_ your name?" he ventured.

"Rose Hawthorne."

He started, and beamed. "There!--I _thought_--but you understand
how--if I had made a mistake--Could anything have been worse if you
had _not_ been? I was looking, you know, for the resemblance. Some
look I seemed to discover, but "----

"The complexion," I helped him by interrupting, "is entirely
different."

He went on: "I was--no, I cannot say I was intimate with your
father, as others may have been; and yet a very delightful kind of
intercourse existed between us. I did not see him often; but when I
did, I had no difficulty in making him converse with me. My
intercourse with your mother was also of a very gratifying nature." To
this I earnestly replied respecting the admiration of my parents for
him. "I delighted in suggesting a train of thought to your father,"
Dr. Holmes ran on, in his exquisitely cultured way, and with the
_esprit_ which has surprised us all by its loveliness. "Perhaps he
would not answer for some time. Sometimes it was a long while before
the answer came, like an echo; but it was sure to come. It was as if
the high mountain range, you know!--_The house-wall there_ would have
rapped out a speedy, babbling response at once; but _the mountain_!--I
not long ago was visiting the Custom House at Salem, the place in
which your father discovered those mysterious records that unfolded
into 'The Scarlet Letter.' Ah, how suddenly and easily genius renders
the spot rare and full of a great and new virtue (however ordinary and
bare in reality) when _it_ has looked and dwelt! A light falls upon
the place not of land or sea! How much he did for Salem! Oh, the
purple light, the soft haze, that now rests upon our glaring New
England! He has _done_ it, and it will never be harsh country again.
How perfectly he understood Salem!"

"Salem is certainly very remarkable," I responded.

"Yes, certainly so," he agreed. "Strange folk! Salem had a type of
itself in its very harbor. The ship America, at Downer's wharf, grew
old and went to pieces in that one spot, through years. Bit by bit it
fell to atoms, but never ceded itself to the new era. So with Salem,
precisely. It is the most delightful place to visit for this reason,
because it so carefully retains the spirit of the past; and 'The House
of the Seven Gables'!" Dr. Holmes smiled, well knowing the
intangibility of that house.

Said I: "The people are rich in extraordinary oddities. At every turn
a stranger is astonished by some intense characteristic. One feels
strongly its different atmosphere."

"And their very surroundings bear them out!" Dr. Holmes cried,
vivacious in movement and glance as a boy. "Where else are the little
door-yards that hold their glint of sunlight so tenaciously, like the
still light of wine in a glass? Year after year it is ever there, the
golden square of precious sunbeams, held on the palm of the jealous
garden-patch, as we would hold the vial of radiant wine in our hand!
Do you know?" He so forcibly appealed to my ability to follow his
thought that I seemed to know anything he wished. "I hope I shall not
be doing wrong," he continued,--"I hope not,--in asking if you have
any preference among your father's books; supposing you read them,
which I believe is by no means always the case with the children of
authors."

"I am surprised by that remark. After the age of fifteen, when I read
all my father's writings except 'The Scarlet Letter,' which I was told
to reserve till I was eighteen, I did not study his books thoroughly
till several years ago, in order to cherish the enjoyment of fresh
effects,--except 'The Marble Faun,' which I think I prefer."

He answered: "I feel that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the greatest. It
will be, it seems to me, the one upon which his future renown will
rest."

I admitted that I also considered it the greatest. In the above
conversation I was entranced by what I have experienced often: the
praise of my father's personality or work (in many cases by people who
have never met him) is not only the courtesy that might be thought
decorous towards a member of his family, or the bright zest of a
student of literature, but also the glowing ardor of a creature
feeling itself a part of him in spirit; one who longs for the human
sweetness of the grasp of his hand; who longs to hear him speak, to
meet his fellowship, but finds the limit reached in saying, at a
distance of time and space, "I love him!" I have lowered my eyes
before the emotion to be observed in the faces of some of his readers
who were trying to reach him through a spoken word of eagerness. Very
few have seen him, but how glad I am to cross their paths! Dr.
Holmes's warmth of enthusiasm was so radiant that it could not be
forgotten. It lit every word with the magic of the passion we feel for
what is perfect, unique, and beyond our actual possession, now and
forever.

Towards the last an unacknowledged fear took hold of my mother's
consciousness, so that she gave every evidence of foretelling my
father's death without once presenting the possibility to herself.
This little note of mine, dated April 4, 1864, six weeks before he
died, shows the truth:--

"I am so glad that you are getting on so well; but for your own sake I
think you had better stay somewhere till you get entirely well. Mamma
thought from the last letter from Mr. Ticknor that you were not so
well; but Julian explained to her that, as Mr. Ticknor said in every
line that you were better, he did not see how it could possibly be. I
do not either."

From the first year of our return to America letters and visitors from
abroad had interrupted the sense of utter quiet; and many friends
called in amiable pilgrimage. But a week of monotony is immensely
long, and a few hours of zest are provokingly short. Nature and
seclusion are welcome when, at our option, we can bid them good-by.
All England is refreshing with the nearness of London. In the rush of
cares and interruptions which we suppose will kill the opportunity,
while we half lose ourselves and our intellectual threads of
speculation, the flowers of inspiration suddenly blow, the gems flash
color. This is a pleasant, but not always an essential satisfaction;
yet, in my father's case, I think his life suffered with peculiar
severity from the sudden clashing aside of manly interests which he
had already denied to himself, or which circumstances had denied to
him, with the utmost persistence ever known in so perceptive a genius.
He undoubtedly had a large store of inherited experiences to draw
upon; he was richly endowed with these, and could sit and walk alone,
year after year (except for occasional warm reunions with friends of
the cleanest joviality), and feel the intercourse with the world, of
his ancestors, stirring in his veins. He tells us that this was
ghostly pastime; but it is an inheritance that makes a man well
equipped and self-sustained, for all that. When too late, the great
men about him realized that they had estimated his presence very
cheaply, considering his worth. Should he frequently have sought them
out, and asked if they were inclined to spare a chat to Hawthorne; or
should they have insisted upon strengthening their greatness from his
inimitably pure and unerring perception and his never weary
imagination? It is impossible to ignore the superiority of his
simplicity of truth over the often labored searchings for it of the
men and women he knew, whose very diction shows the straining after
effect, the desire to enchant themselves with their own minds, which
is the bane of intellect, or else the uneasy skip and jump of a wit
that dares not keep still. As time ripens, these things are more and
more apparent to all, as they were to him. In a manner similar to
Emerson's, who spoke of his regret for losing the chance of
associating fully with my father, Longfellow wrote to my mother:--

CAMBRIDGE, June 23, 1864.

DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--I have long been wishing to write to you, to
thank you for your kind remembrance, in sending me the volume of
Goldsmith, but I have not had the heart to do it. There are some
things that one cannot say; and I hardly need tell you how much I
value your gift, and how often I shall look at the familiar name on
the blank leaf--a name which, more than any other, links me to my
youth.

I have written a few lines trying to express the impressions of May
23, and I venture to send you a copy of them. I had rather no one
should see them but yourself; as I have also sent them to Mr. Fields
for the "Atlantic." I feel how imperfect and inadequate they are; but
I trust you will pardon their deficiencies for the love I bear his
memory. More than ever I now regret that I postponed from day to day
coming to see you in Concord, and that at last I should have seen your
house only on the outside! With deepest sympathy, Yours truly,

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

To go back to our Concord amusements. Mr. Bright caroled out a
greeting not very long after our return:--

WEST DERBY, September 8, 1860.

MY DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--Of course not!--I knew you 'd never write to
me, though you declared you would. Probably by this time you've
forgotten us all, and sent us off into mistland with Miriam and
Donatello; possibly all England looks by this time nothing but
mistland, and you believe only in Concord and its white houses, and
the asters on the hill behind your house, and the pumpkins in the
valley below. Well, at any rate I have not forgotten you or yours; and
I feel that, now you have left us, a pleasure has slipped out of our
grasp. Do you remember all our talks in that odious office of yours;
my visits to Rock-ferry; my one visit, all in the snow, to Southport;
our excursions into Wales, and through the London streets, and to
Rugby and to Cambridge; and how you plucked the laurel at Addison's
Bilton, and found the skeleton in Dr. Williams's library; and lost
your umbrella in those dark rooms in Trinity; and dined at Richmond,
and saw the old lady looking like a maid of honor of Queen Charlotte's
time; and chatted at the Cosmopolitan; and heard Tom Hughes sing the
"Tight Little Island;" and--But really I must stop, and can only trust
that now at last you will be convinced of my existence, and remember
your promise, and write me a good long letter about everything and
everybody. "The Marble Faun" [manuscript] is now in process of
binding. The photograph came just as I had begun to despair of it, and
I lost not a moment in putting the precious manuscript into my
binder's hands. I've been for a week's holiday at Tryston, and met
several friends of yours: Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hughes, Mrs. and Miss
Procter, Mrs. Milnes. The latter spoke most affectionately about you.
And so did Mrs. Ainsworth, whom I met two days ago. But she says you
promised to write her the story of the Bloody Footstep ["The Ancestral
Footstep "], and have never done it. I'm very fond of Mrs. Ainsworth;
she talks such good nonsense. She told us gravely, the other day, that
the Druses were much more interesting than the Maronites, because they
sounded like Drusus and Rome, whereas the Maronites were only like
marrons glaces, etc. The H----s are at Norris Green. Mrs. H. is
becoming "devout," and will go to church on Wednesdays and Fridays. I
want news from your side. What is Longfellow about? Tell me about
"Leaves of Grass," which I saw at Milnes's. Who and what is the
author; and who buy and who read the audacious (I use mildest epithet)
book? I must now bring this letter to an end. Emerson will have
forgotten so humble a person as I am; but I can't forget the pleasant
day I spent with him. Ask Longfellow to come over here very soon.
And for yourself, ever believe me most heartily yours,

H. A. BRIGHT.

He writes to my mother, "Thank you for the precious autograph letters,
and the signatures of the various generals in your war. . . . What a
pleasant account you give of Julian. Remember me to him. What a big
fellow he has become, and formidable. I sincerely hope he 's given up
his old wish to 'kill an Englishman, some day!' Don't forget us all,
for we think of all of you." He speaks of my father's friendship as
"the proudest treasure of my life."

A friend of Mr. Bright's pardons my father's unfeeling indifference by
a request:--

WALTHAM HOUSE, WALTHAM CROSS, August 10, 1861.

DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--Am I not showing my Christian charity when, in
spite of the terrible disappointment which I felt at your broken
promise to come with Bright to smoke a cigar with me about this time
last year, I entreat you, in greeting Mr. Anthony Trollope, who with
his wife is about to visit America, to give him an extra welcome and
shake of the hand, for the sake of yours most sincerely and
respectfully,

W. W. SYNGE.

I will quote two letters from Mr. Chorley, written before we left
England, to show that even writers and friends there could be a trifle
irksome in comment. My mother amused me sometimes by telling me how
she had written warringly to this noted critic (a cherished
acquaintance), when he had printed a disquisition upon "Monte Beni"
which did not hit the bull's-eye. But the last supplementary chapter
in the Romance was due to his fainting desire for more revelation,--a
chapter which my father and mother looked upon as entirely useless,
and British.

13 EATON PLACE, WEST, March 6, '60.

DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--I cannot but affectionately thank you for your
remembrance of me, and your patience with my note.--If I do not return
on my own critical fancies about the "Romance" (and pray, recollect, I
am the last who would assume that critics wear a mail celestial, and
as such can do no wrong)--it may be from some knowledge, that those
who have lived with a work while it is growing--and those who greet
it, when it is born, complete into life,--cannot see with the same
eyes. I don't think, if we three sate together, and could talk the
whole dream out, a matter, by the way, hardly possible, we should have
so much difference as you fancy--so much did I enjoy, and so deeply
was I stirred by the book, that (let alone past associations and
predilections) I neither read, nor wrote (meant to write, that is) in
a caviling spirit: but that which simply and clearly seemed to present
itself in regard to a book which had possessed me (for better for
worse) in no common degree--by one on whom (I think is known) I set no
common store.--If I have seemed to yourselves hasty or superficial or
flippant--all I can say is, such was not my meaning.--Surely the best
things can bear the closest looking at,--whether as regards beauty or
blemish.--

I repeat that, while I thank you affectionately for the trouble you
have taken to expostulate with my frowardness (if so it be)--I am just
as much concerned if what was printed gave any pain. But, when I look
again (I have been interrupted twenty times since I began this)--did I
not say that Hilda was "cousin"--that is, family likeness, not
identity--though it means, what I meant, the same sort of light of
purity and grace, and redemption let into a maze, through somewhat the
same sort of chink.--I totally resist any idea of mannerism, dear
friend Hawthorne,--on your part,--and as to the story growing on you,
as you grow into it: well, I dare' say that has happened ere
this:--the best creations have come by chance: and if Hawthorne did
not mean to excite an interest when he wanted merely to make a Roman
idyl, why did we go into those Catacombs?--

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