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The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne

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"The outcry opened against Gen. McClellan, since the enemy's retreat
from Manassas, is really terrible, and almost universal; because it is
found that we might have taken their fortifications with perfect ease
six months ago, they being defended chiefly by wooden guns. Unless he
achieves something wonderful within a week, he will be removed from
command, at least I hope so; I never did more than half believe in him.
By a message from the State Department, I have reason to think that
there is money enough due me from the government to pay the expenses of
my journey. I think the public buildings are as fine, if not finer,
than anything we saw in Europe." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 309.]

General McClellan was not a great man, and Hawthorne's opinion of him
is more significant from the fact that at that time McClellan was
expected to be the Joshua who would lead the Democratic party out of
its wilderness. On his return to Concord, Hawthorne prepared a
commentary on what he had seen and heard at the seat of war, and sent
it to the _Atlantic Monthly_; but, although patriotic enough, his
melancholy humor was prominent in it, and Fields particularly protested
against his referring to President Lincoln as "Old Abe," although the
President was almost universally called so in Washington; and the
consequence of this was that Hawthorne eliminated everything that he
had written about Lincoln in his account,--which might be called
"dehamletizing" the subject. In addition to this he wrote a number of
foot-notes purporting to come from the editor, but really intended to
counteract the unpopularity of certain statements in the text. This was
not done with any intention to deceive, but, with the exception of
Emerson and a few others who could always recognize Hawthorne's style,
the readers of the _Atlantic_ supposed that these foot-notes were
written by either James T. Fields or James Russell Lowell, who had been
until recently the editor of the Magazine,--a practical joke which
Hawthorne enjoyed immensely when it was discovered to him.

This contribution, essay, or whatever it may be called, had only a
temporary value, but it contained a prediction, which has been often
recollected in Hawthorne's favor; namely, that after the war was over
"one bullet-headed general after another would succeed to the
presidential chair." In fact, five generals, whether bullet-headed or
not, followed after Lincoln and Johnson; and then the sequence came to
an end apparently because the supply of politician generals was
exhausted. Certainly the Anglo-Saxon race yields to no other in
admiration for military glory.

Fields afterward published Hawthorne's monograph on President Lincoln,
and, although it is rather an unsympathetic statement of the man, it
remains the only authentic pen-and-ink sketch that we have of him. Most
important is his recognition of Lincoln as "essentially a Yankee" in
appearance and character; for it has only recently been discovered that
Lincoln was descended from an old New England family, and that his
ancestors first emigrated to Virginia and afterward to Kentucky.
[Footnote: Essay on Lincoln in "True Republicanism."] Hawthorne says of
him:

"If put to guess his calling and livelihood, I should have taken him
for a country schoolmaster as soon as anything else. [Footnote: The
country school-master of that time.--Ed.] He was dressed in a rusty
black frock-coat and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully that
the suit had adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his
figure, and had grown to be the outer skin of the man. He had shabby
slippers on his feet. His hair was black, still unmixed with gray,
stiff, somewhat bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither
brush nor comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the pillow;
and as to a nightcap, Uncle Abe probably knows nothing of such
effeminacies. His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an
insalubrious atmosphere around the White House; he has thick black
eyebrows and impending brow; his nose is large, and the lines about his
mouth are very strongly denned.

"The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere in
the length and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is redeemed,
illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though serious look
out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity, that seems
weighted with rich results of village experience. A great deal of
native sense; no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest at heart,
and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort, sly,--at least, endowed with
a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft.... But on the whole,
I liked this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human
sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter, would
as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would have been
practicable to put in his place." [Footnote: "Yesterdays with Authors,"
99.]

This is not a flattered portrait, like those by Lincoln's political
biographers; neither is it an idealized likeness, such as we may
imagine him delivering his Gettysburg Address. It is rather an external
description of the man, but it is, after all, Lincoln as he appeared in
the White House to the innumerable visitors, who, as sovereign American
citizens, believed they had a right to an interview with the people's
distinguished servant.

Hawthorne's European letter-bag in 1862 is chiefly interesting for
Henry Bright's statement that the English people might have more
sympathy with the Union cause in the War if they could understand
clearly what the national government was fighting for; and that Lord
Houghton and Thomas Hughes were the only two men he had met who
heartily supported the Northern side. Perhaps Mr. Bright would have
found it equally as difficult to explain why the British Government
should have made war upon Napoleon for twelve consecutive years.

Henry Bright, moreover, seemed to be quite as much interested in a new
American poet, named J. G. Holland, and his poem called "Bitter-Sweet."
Lord Houghton agreed with him that it was a very remarkable poem, and
they wished to know what Hawthorne could tell them about its author. As
Holland was not recognized as a poet by the Saturday Club, Hawthorne's
answer on this point would be very valuable if we could only obtain a
sight of it. Holland was in certain respects the counterpart of Martin
F. Tupper.

In the summer of this year Hawthorne went to West Goldsboro', Maine, an
unimportant place opposite Mount Desert Island, taking Julian with him;
a place with a stimulating climate but a rather foggy atmosphere. He
must have gone there for his health, and it is pathetic to see how the
change of climate braced him up at first, so that he even made the
commencement of a new diary, and then, as always happens in such cases,
it let him down again to where he was before. He did not complain, but
he felt that something was wrong with him and he could not tell what it
was.

Wherever he went in passing through the civilized portion of Maine, he
found the country astir with recruits who had volunteered for the war,
so that it seemed as if that were the only subject which occupied men's
minds. He says of this in his journal:

"I doubt whether any people was ever actuated by a more genuine and
disinterested public spirit; though, of course, it is not unalloyed
with baser motives and tendencies. We met a train of cars with a
regiment or two just starting for the South, and apparently in high
spirits. Everywhere some insignia of soldiership were to be seen,--
bright buttons, a red stripe down the trousers, a military cap, and
sometimes a round-shouldered bumpkin in the entire uniform. They
require a great deal to give them the aspect of soldiers; indeed, it
seems as if they needed to have a good deal taken away and added, like
the rough clay of a sculptor as it grows to be a model."

Such is the last entry in his journal. Hawthorne was not carried off
his feet by the excitement of the time, but looked calmly on while
others expended their patriotism in hurrahing for the Union. What he
remarks concerning the volunteers was perfectly true Men cannot change
their profession in a day, and soldiers are not to be made out of
farmers' boys and store clerks simply by clothing them in uniform, no
matter how much courage they may have. War is a profession like other
professions, and requires the severest training of them all.




CHAPTER XVIII

IMMORTALITY


In the autumn of 1862 there was great excitement in Massachusetts.
President Lincoln had issued his premonitory proclamation of
emancipation, and Harvard College was stirred to its academic depths.
Professor Joel Parker, of the Law School, pronounced Lincoln's action
unconstitutional, subversive of the rights of property, and a most
dangerous precedent. With Charles Eliot Norton and other American
Tories, Parker headed a movement for the organization of a People's
Party, which had for its immediate object the defeat of Andrew for
Governor and the relegation of Sumner to private life. The first they
could hardly expect to accomplish, but it was hoped that a sufficient
number of conservative representatives would be elected to the
Legislature to replace Sumner by a Republican, who would be more to
their own minds; and they would be willing to compromise on such a
candidate as Honorable E. R. Hoar,--although Judge Hoar was innocent of
this himself and was quite as strongly anti-slavery as Sumner. The
movement came to nothing, as commonly happens with political movements
that originate in universities, but for the time being it caused a
great commotion and nowhere more so than in the town of Concord.
Emerson was never more emphatic than in demanding the re-election of
Andrew and Sumner.

How Hawthorne felt about this and how he voted in November, can only be
conjectured by certain indications, slight, it is true, but all
pointing in one direction. As long since explained, he entertained no
very friendly feeling toward the Cotton Whigs; his letter to his
daughter concerning Gen. McClellan, who set himself against the
proclamation and was removed in consequence, should be taken into
consideration; and still more significant is the letter to Horatio
Bridge, in which Hawthorne proposed the enlistment of negro soldiers.
Doctor George B. Loring, of Salem, always a loyal friend to the
Hawthorne family, came to Concord in September to deliver an address at
the annual cattle-show, and visited at the Wayside. He had left the
Democratic party and become a member of the Bird Club, which was then
the centre of political influence in the State. As a matter of course
he explained his new position to Hawthorne. He had long felt attracted
to the Republican party, and but for his influential position among his
fellow-Democrats, he would have joined it sooner. Parties were being
reconstructed. Half the Democrats had become Republicans; and a
considerable portion of the Whigs had joined the Democratic party. The
interests of the Republic were in the hands of the Republican party and
it ought to be supported. We can believe that Hawthorne listened to him
with close attention.

It was in the spring of 1862 that I first became well acquainted with
the Hawthorne family, which seemed to exist in an atmosphere of purity
and refinement derived from the man's own genius. Julian visited me at
our house in Medford during the early summer, where he made great havoc
among the small fruits of the season. We boxed, fenced, skated, played
cricket and studied Cicero together. As my father was one of the most
revolutionary of the Free-Soilers, this may have amused Hawthorne as an
instance of the Montagues and Capulets; but I found much sympathy with
my political notions in his household. When the first of January came
there was a grand celebration of the Emancipation in Boston Music Hall.
Mrs. Hawthorne and Una were very desirous to attend it, and I believe
they both did so--Miss Una at all events. If Mrs. Hawthorne's opinions
could be taken in any sense as a reflection of her husband's mind, he
was certainly drifting away from his old associations.

In October, 1862, Hawthorne published the first of a series of studies
from English life and scenery, taken chiefly from his Note-book, and he
continued this at intervals until the following summer, when Ticknor &
Fields brought them out with some additions in book form as "Our Old
Home;" a volume which has already been considered in these pages. It
was not a favorable time for the publication of classic literature, for
the whole population of the United States was in a ferment; and
moreover the unfriendly attitude of the English educated classes toward
the cause of the Union, was beginning to have its effect with us. In
truth it seemed rather inconsistent that the philanthropic Gladstone,
who had always professed himself the friend of freedom, should glorify
Jefferson Davis as the founder of a new nation--a republic of
slaveholders. In addition to this, Hawthorne insisted on dedicating the
volume to President Pierce, and when his publishers protested that this
would tend to make the book unpopular, he replied in a spirited manner,
that if that was the case it was all the more reason why Pierce's
friends should signify their continued confidence in him. This may have
made little difference, however, for comparatively few readers notice
the dedication of a book until after they have purchased it; and we
like Hawthorne for his firmness in this instance.

In England the book produced a sensation of the unfavorable sort.
Hawthorne's attack on the rotundity of the English ladies, whatever may
have been his reason for it, was, to speak reservedly, somewhat lacking
in delicacy. It stirred up a swarm of newspaper enemies against him;
and proved a severe strain to the attachment of his friends there.
Henry Bright wrote to him:

"It really was too bad, some of the things you say. You talk like a
cannibal. Mrs. Heywood says to my mother, 'I really believe you and I
were the only ladies he knew in Liverpool, and we are not like
beefsteaks.' So all the ladies are furious." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne,
ii. 280. Good Mrs. Alcott also objected stoutly to the reflections on
her sex.]

But Hawthorne was no longer what he had been, and allowance should be
made for this.

Hawthorne's chief interest at this time, however, lay in the
preparation of his son for Harvard College. Julian was sixteen in
August and, considering the itinerant life he had lived, well advanced
in his studies. He was the best-behaved boy in Concord, in school or
out, and an industrious though not ambitious scholar. He was strong,
vigorous and manly; and his parents had sufficient reason to be proud
of him. To expect him, however, to enter Harvard College at the age of
seventeen was somewhat unreasonable. His father had entered Bowdoin at
that age, but the requirements at Harvard were much more severe than at
Bowdoin; enough to make a difference of at least one year in the age of
the applicant. For a boy to enter college in a half-fitted condition is
simply to make a false start in life, for he is only too likely to
become discouraged, and either to drag along at the foot of the class
or to lose his place in it altogether. Hawthorne may have felt that the
end of earthly affairs was close upon him, and wished to see his son
started on the right road before that came; but Emerson also had an
interest in having Julian go to college at exactly this time; namely,
to obtain him as a chum for his wife's nephew, with the advantage of a
tutor's room thrown in as an extra inducement. He advised Hawthorne to
place Julian in charge of a Harvard professor who was supposed to have
a sleight-of-hand faculty for getting his pupils through the
examinations. Julian worked bravely, and succeeded in entering Harvard
the following July; but he was nine months (or a good school year),
younger than the average of his class.

Hawthorne did not leave home this summer (1863), and the only letter we
have of his was the one to James T. Fields concerning the dedication of
"Our Old Home," which was published in the autumn. Julian states that
his father spent much of his time standing or walking in his narrow
garden before the house, and looking wistfully across the meadows to
Walden woods. His strength was evidently failing him, yet he could not
explain why--nor has it ever been explained.

One bright day in November two of us walked up from Cambridge with
Julian and lunched at his father's. Mr. Hawthorne received us
cordially, but in a tremulous manner that betrayed the weakness of his
nerves. As soon as Julian had left the room, he said to us, "I suppose
it would be of little use to ask you young gentlemen what sort of a
scholar Julian is." H---- replied to this, that we were neither of us
in the division with him, but that he had heard nothing unfavorable in
regard to his recitations; and I told him that Julian went to the
gymnasium with me every evening, and appeared to live a very regular
kind of life. This seemed to please Mr. Hawthorne very much, and he
soon produced a decanter of port, and, his son having entered the room
again, he said, "I want to teach Julian the taste of good wine, so that
he will learn to avoid those horrible punches, which I am told you have
at Harvard." We all laughed greatly at this, which was afterward
increased by Julian's saying that the only punches he had yet seen were
those which the sophomores gave us in the foot-ball fight,--or some
such statement. It was a bright occasion for all of us, and when Mrs.
Hawthorne and her daughters entered the room, such a beautiful group as
they all formed together! And Hawthorne himself seemed ten years
younger than when he first greeted us.

He was the most distinguished-looking man that I ever beheld, and no
sensible person could meet him without instantly recognizing his
superior mental endowment. His features were not only classic but
grandly classic; and his eyes large, dark, luminous, unfathomable--
looking into them was like looking into a deep well. His face seemed to
give a pictorial reflection of whatever was taking place about him; and
again became like a transparency through which one could see dim vistas
of beautiful objects. The changes of expression on it were like the
sunshine and clouds of a summer day--perhaps thunder clouds sometimes,
with flashes of lightning, which his son may still remember; for where
there is a great heart there will always be great heat.


"THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE"

According to James T. Fields, the ground-plan of this work was laid the
preceding winter, but Hawthorne became dissatisfied with the way in
which the subject developed itself and so set the manuscript aside
until he could come to it again with fresh inspiration. With the more
bracing weather of September he commenced on it again, and wrote during
the next two months that portion which we now have. On December 1 he
forwarded two chapters to Ticknor & Fields, requesting to have them set
up so that he could see them in print and obtain a retrospective view
of his work before he proceeded further. Yet on December 15 he wrote
again, saying that he had not yet found courage to attack the proofs,
and that all mental exertion had become hateful to him. [Footnote:
"Yesterdays with Authors," 115.] He was evidently feeling badly, and
for the first time Mrs. Hawthorne was seriously anxious for him. Four
days later she wrote to Una, who was visiting in Beverly:

"Papa is comfortable to-day, but very thin and pale and weak. I give
him oysters now. Hitherto he has had only toasted crackers and lamb and
beef tea. I am very impatient that he should see Dr. Vanderseude, but
he wants to go to him himself, and he cannot go till it be good
weather.... The splendor and pride of strength in him have succumbed;
but they can be restored, I am sure. Meanwhile he is very nervous and
delicate; he cannot bear anything, and he must be handled like the
airiest Venetian glass." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 333.]

He divided his time between lying on a sofa and sitting in an arm-
chair; and he did not seem very comfortable in either position. It was
long since he had attended meetings of the Saturday Club.

It is clear from this that Hawthorne had not recently consulted a
doctor concerning his condition, and perhaps not at all. He may have
been right enough in supposing that no common practitioner could give
him help, but there was at that time one of the finest of physiologists
in Boston, Dr. Edward H. Clark, who cured hundreds of sick people every
year, as quietly and unostentatiously as Dame Nature herself. He was a
graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, and as such not generally
looked upon with favor by the Boston medical profession, but when
Agassiz's large brain gave way in 1868, Dr. Brown-Séquard telegraphed
to him from Europe to consult Edward Clark, and Doctor Clark so
improved his health that Agassiz afterward enjoyed a number of years of
useful work. Perhaps he might have accomplished as much for Hawthorne;
but how was Hawthorne in his retired and uncommunicative life to know
of him? There are decided advantages in living in the great world, and
in knowing what goes on there,--if one only can.

It is doubtful if Hawthorne ever opened the proof of "The Dolliver
Romance." In February he wrote to Fields that he could not possibly go
on with it, and as it had already been advertised for the _Atlantic
Monthly_, a notification had to be published concerning the matter,
which startled Longfellow, Whittier and other old friends of Hawthorne,
who were not in the way of knowing much about him. The fragment that we
now have of it was printed in the _Atlantic_ many years after his
death.

It was the last expiring ember of Hawthorne's genius, blazing up
fitfully and momentarily with the same brightness as of old, and then
disappearing like Hawthorne himself into the unknown and the
unknowable. It is a fragment, and yet it seems complete, for it is
impossible to imagine how the story could have been continued beyond
its present limits; and Hawthorne left no word from which we can
conjecture his further intentions in regard to it.

There was an old apothecary in Concord, named Reynolds, a similar man
to, but not so aged as, Hawthorne's Doctor Dolliver; and he also had a
son, a bright enterprising boy,--too bright and spirited to suit Boston
commercialism,--who went westward in 1858 to seek his fortune, nor have
I ever heard of his return. The child Pansie, frisking with her kitten
--a more simple, ingenuous, and self-centred, but also less sympathetic
nature than the Pearl of Hester Prynne--may have been studied from
Hawthorne's daughter Rose. There also lived at Concord in Hawthorne's
time a man with the title of Colonel, a pretentious, self-satisfied
person, who corresponded fairly to his description of Colonel Dabney,
in "The Dolliver Romance." Neither is it singular that the apothecary's
garden should have bordered on a grave-yard, for there are two old
cemeteries in Concord in the very centre of the town.

I know of no such portrait of an old man as Doctor Dolliver in art or
literature,--except perhaps Tintoretto's portrait of his aged self, in
the Louvre. We not only see the customary marks of age upon him, but we
feel them so that it seems as if we grew old and stiff and infirm as we
read of him; and the internal life of old age is revealed to us, not by
confessions of the man himself, but by every word he speaks and every
act he does as if the writer were a skilful tragedian upon the stage.
It seems as if Hawthorne must have felt all this himself during the
last year of his life, to describe it so vividly; but he ascends by
these infirm steps to loftier heights than ever before, and the scene
in which he represents Doctor Dolliver seated at night before the fire
in his chamber after Pansie had been put to bed, is the noblest passage
in the whole cycle of Hawthorne's art; one of those rare passages
written in moments of gifted insight, when it seems as if a higher
power guided the writer's hand. It is given here entire, for to
subtract a word from it would be an irreparable injury.

"While that music lasted, the old man was alive and happy. And there
were seasons, it might be, happier than even these, when Pansie had
been kissed and put to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his fireside
gazing in among the massive coals, and absorbing their glow into those
cavernous abysses with which all men communicate. Hence come angels or
fiends into our twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them
in by-gone years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the
fire-gleam, stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made
him as beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child
Pansie on her pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him
beheld a calm surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into
joy, yet not so vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of
heaven had been kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might
catch a glimpse within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-
conscious of an intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of
an old man's slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint
thrilling of the heart-strings, as if there had been music just now
wandering over them."

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