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The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne

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It was now that Horatio Bridge proved himself a true friend, and
equally a man. In the spring of 1836 Goodrich had obtained for
Hawthorne the editorship of the _American Magazine of Useful and
Entertaining Knowledge_, with a salary of five hundred dollars;
[Footnote: Conway, 45.]but he soon discovered that he had embarked on a
ship with a rotten hulk. He started off heroically, writing the whole
of the first number with the help of his sister Elizabeth; but by
midsummer the concern was bankrupt, and he retired to his lonely cell,
more gloomy and despondent than before. There are few sadder spectacles
then that of a man seeking work without being able to obtain it; and
this applies to the man of genius as well as to the day laborer.

Horatio Bridge now realized that the time had come for him to
interfere. He recognized that Hawthorne was gradually lapsing into a
hypochondria that might terminate fatally; that he was Goethe's oak
planted in a flowerpot, and that unless the flower-pot could be broken,
the oak would die. He also saw that Hawthorne would never receive the
public recognition that was due to his ability, so long as he published
magazine articles under an assumed name. He accordingly wrote to
Goodrich--fortunately before his mill-dam gave way--suggesting the
publication of a volume of Hawthorne's stories, and offered to
guarantee the publisher against loss. This proposition was readily
accepted, but Bridge might have made a much better bargain. What it
amounted to was, the half-profit system without the half-profit. The
necessary papers were exchanged and Hawthorne gladly acceded to
Goodrich's terms. Bridge, however, had cautioned Goodrich not to inform
Hawthorne of his share in the enterprise, and the consequence of this
was that he shortly received a letter from Hawthorne, informing him of
the good news--which he knew already--and praising Goodrich, to whom he
proposed to dedicate his new volume. Bridge's generosity had come back
to him, dried and salted,--as it has to many another.

What could Bridge do, in the premises? Goodrich had written to
Hawthorne that the publisher, Mr. Howes, was confident of making a
favorable arrangement _with a man of capital who would edit the
book_; but Bridge did not know this, and he suspected Goodrich of
sailing into Hawthorne's favor under a false flag. He therefore wrote
to Hawthorne, November 17, 1836:

"I fear you will hurt yourself by puffing Goodrich
_undeservedly_,--for there is no doubt in my mind of his
selfishness in regard to your work and yourself. I am perfectly aware
that he has taken a good deal of interest in you, but when did he ever
do anything for you without a _quid pro quo_? The magazine was
given to you for $100 less than it should have been. The _Token_
was saved by your writing. Unless you are already committed, do not mar
the prospects of your _first_ book by hoisting Goodrich into
favor."

This prevented the dedication, for which Hawthorne was afterward
thankful enough. The book, which was the first volume of "Twice Told
Tales" came from the press the following spring, and proved an
immediate success, although not a highly lucrative one for its author.
With the help of Longfellow's cordial review of it in the North
American it established Hawthorne's reputation on a firm and
irrefragable basis. All honor to Horatio.

As if Hawthorne had not seen a sufficiently long "winter of discontent"
already, his friends now proposed to obtain the position of secretary
and chronicler for him on Commodore Jones's exploring expedition to the
South Pole! Franklin Pierce was the first to think of this, but Bridge
interceded with Cilley to give it his support, and there can be no
doubt that they would have succeeded in obtaining the position for
Hawthorne, but the expedition itself failed, for lack of a
Congressional appropriation. The following year, 1838, the project was
again brought forward by the administration, and Congress being in a
more amiable frame of mind granted the requisite funds; but Hawthorne
had now contracted new ties in his native city, bound, as it were, by
an inseparable cord stronger than a Manila hawser, and Doctor Nathaniel
Peabody's hospitable parlors were more attractive to him than anything
the Antarctic regions could offer.

We have now entered upon the period where Hawthorne's own diary
commences, the autobiography of a pure-minded, closely observing man;
an invaluable record, which began apparently in 1835, and was continued
nearly until the close of his life; now published in a succession of
American, English and Italian note-books. In it we find records of what
he saw and thought; descriptive passages, afterward made serviceable in
his works of fiction, and perhaps written with that object in view;
fanciful notions, jotted down on the impulse of the moment; records of
his social life; but little critical writing or personal confessions,--
although the latter may have been reserved; from publication by his
different editors. It is known that much of his diary has not yet been
given to the public, and perhaps never will be.

In July, 1837, Hawthorne went to Augusta, to spend a month with his
friend Horatio Bridge; went fishing with him, for what they called
white perch, probably the saibling; [Footnote: The American saibling,
or golden trout, is only indigenous to Lake Sunapee, New Hampshire, and
to a small lake near Augusta.] and was greatly entertained with the
peculiarities of an idiomatic Frenchman, an itinerant teacher of that
language, whom Bridge, in the kindness of his heart, had taken into his
own house. The last of July, Cilley also made his appearance, but did
not bring the Madeira with him, and Hawthorne has left this rather
critical portrait of him in his diary:

"Friday, July 28th.--Saw my classmate and formerly intimate friend, ----,
for the first time since we graduated. He has met with good success
in life, in spite of circumstances, having struggled upward against
bitter opposition, by the force of his abilities, to be a member of
Congress, after having been for some time the leader of his party in
the State Legislature. We met like old friends, and conversed almost as
freely as we used to do in college days, twelve years ago and more. He
is a singular person, shrewd, crafty, insinuating, with wonderful tact,
seizing on each man by his manageable point, and using him for his own
purpose, often without the man's suspecting that he is made a tool of;
and yet, artificial as his character would seem to be, his
conversation, at least to myself, was full of natural feeling, the
expression of which can hardly be mistaken, and his revelations with
regard to himself had really a great deal of frankness. A man of the
most open nature might well have been more reserved to a friend, after
twelve years separation, than ---- was to me. Nevertheless, he is
really a crafty man, concealing, like a murder-secret, anything that it
is not good for him to have known. He by no means feigns the good
feeling that he professes, nor is there anything affected in the
frankness of his conversation; and it is this that makes him so
fascinating. There is such a quantity of truth and kindliness and warm
affections, that a man's heart opens to him, in spite of himself. He
deceives by truth. And not only is he crafty, but, when occasion
demands, bold and fierce like a tiger, determined, and even
straightforward and undisguised in his measures,--a daring fellow as
well as a sly one."

This can be no other than Jonathan Cilley; like many of his class, a
man of great good humor but not over-scrupulous, so far as the means he
might make use of were concerned. He did not, however, prove to be as
skilful a diplomat as Hawthorne seems to have supposed him. The duel
between Cilley and Graves, of Kentucky, has been so variously
misrepresented that the present occasion would seem a fitting
opportunity to tell the plain truth concerning it.

President Jackson was an honest man, in the customary sense of the
term, and he would have scorned to take a dollar that was not his own;
but he suffered greatly from parasites, who pilfered the nation's
money,--the natural consequence of the spoils-of-office system. The
exposure of these peculations gave the Whigs a decided advantage, and
Cilley, who had quickly proved his ability in debate, attempted to set
a back-fire by accusing Watson Webb, the editor of the _Courier and
Enquirer_, of having been bribed to change the politics of his
paper. The true facts of the case were, that the paper had been
purchased by the Whigs, and Webb, of course, had a right to change his
politics if he chose to; and the net result of Cilley's attack was a
challenge to mortal combat, carried by Representative Graves, of
Kentucky. Cilley, although a man of courage, declined this, on the
ground that members of Congress ought not to be called to account
outside of the Capitol, for words spoken in debate. "Then," said
Graves, "you will at least admit that my friend is a gentleman."

This was a fair offer toward conciliation, and if Cilley had been
peaceably inclined he would certainly have accepted it; but he
obstinately refused to acknowledge that General Webb was a gentleman,
and in consequence of this he received a second challenge the next day
from Graves, brought by Henry A. Wise, afterward Governor of Virginia.
Cilley still objected to fighting, but members of his party urged him
into it: the duel took place, and Cilley was killed.

It may be said in favor of the "code of honor" that it discourages
blackguardism and instructs a man to keep a civil tongue; but it is not
always possible to prevent outbursts of temper, especially in hot
climates, and a man's wife and children should also be considered.
Andrew Jackson said at the close of his life, that there was nothing he
regretted so much as having killed a human being in a duel. Man rises
by humility, and angels fall from pride.

Hawthorne wrote a kindly and regretful notice of the death of his old
acquaintance, which was published in the _Democratic Review_, and
which closed with this significant passage:

"Alas, that over the grave of a dear friend, my sorrow for the
bereavement must be mingled with another grief--that he threw away such
a life in so miserable a cause! Why, as he was true to the Northern
character in all things else, did he swerve from his Northern
principles in this final scene?" [Footnote: Conway, 63.]

It will be well to bear this in mind in connection with a somewhat
similar incident, which we have now to consider.

An anecdote has been repeated in all the books about Hawthorne
published since 1880, which would do him little credit if it could be
proved,--a story that he challenged one of his friends to a duel, at
the instigation of a vulgar and unprincipled young woman. Horatio
Bridge says in reference to it:

"This characteristic was notably displayed several years later, when a
lady incited him to quarrel with one of his best friends on account of
a groundless pique of hers. He went to Washington for the purpose of
challenging the gentleman, and it was only after ample explanation had
been made, showing that his friend had behaved with entire honor, that
Pierce and Cilley, who were his advisers, could persuade him to be
satisfied without a fight." [Footnote: Bridge, 5.]

How the good Horatio could have fallen into this pit is unimaginable,
for a double contradiction is contained in his statement. "Some time
after this," that is after leaving college, would give the impression
that the affair took place about 1830, whereas Pierce and Cilley were
not in Washington together till five or six years later--probably seven
years later. Moreover, Hawthorne states in a letter to Pierce's friend
O'Sullivan, on April 1, 1853, that he had never been in Washington up
to that time. The Manning family and Mrs. Hawthorne's relatives never
heard of the story previous to its publication.

The internal evidence is equally strong against it. What New England
girl would behave in the manner that Hawthorne's son represents this
one to have done? What young gentleman would have listened to such a
communication as he supposes, and especially the reserved and modest
Hawthorne? One can even imagine the aspect of horror on his face at
such an unlady-like proceeding. The story would be an ignominious one
for Hawthorne, if it were credible, but there is no occasion for our
believing it until some tangible evidence is adduced in its support.
There was no element of Quixotism in his composition, and it is quite
as impossible to locate the identity of the person whom Hawthorne is
supposed to have challenged.




CHAPTER V

EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839


It was fortunate for Hawthorne that there was at this time a periodical
in the United States, the _North American Review_, which was
generally looked upon as an authority in literature, and which in most
instances deserved the confidence that was placed in it, for its
reviews were written by men of distinguished ability. It was the
_North American Review_ which made the reputation of L. Maria
Child, and which enrolled Hawthorne in the order of geniuses.

There is not much literary criticism in Longfellow's review, and he
does not "rise to the level of the accomplished essayist" of our own
time, [Footnote: Who writes so correctly and says so little to the
purpose.] but he goes to the main point with the single-mindness of the
true poet. "A new star," he says, "has appeared in the skies"--a
veritable prediction. "Others will gaze at it with telescopes, and
decide whether it is in the constellation of Orion or the Great Bear.
It is enough for us to gaze at it, to admire it, and welcome it."

"Although Hawthorne writes in prose, he belongs among the poets. To
every subject he touches he gives a poetic personality which emanates
from the man himself. His sympathies extend to all things living, and
even to the inanimates. Another characteristic is the exceeding beauty
of his style. It is as clear as running waters are. Indeed he uses
words as mere stepping-stones, upon which, with a free and youthful
bound, his spirit crosses and re-crosses the bright and rushing stream
of thought."

Again he says:

"A calm, thoughtful face seems to be looking at you from every page;
with now a pleasant smile, and now a shade of sadness stealing over its
features. Sometimes, though not often, it glares wildly at you, with a
strange and painful expression, as, in the German romance, the bronze
knocker of the Archivarius Lindhorst makes up faces at the Student
Anselmus."

Here we have a portrait of Hawthorne, by one who knew him, in a few
simple words; and behind a calm thoughtful face there is that
mysterious unknown quantity which puzzles Longfellow here, and always
perplexed Hawthorne's friends. It may have been the nucleus or tap-root
of his genius.

Longfellow seems to have felt it as a dividing line between them. He
probably felt so at college; and this brings us back to an old subject.
Hawthorne's superiority to Longfellow as an artist consisted
essentially in this, that he was never an optimist. Puritanism looked
upon human nature with a hostile eye, and was inclined to see evil in
it where none existed; and Doctor Channing, who inaugurated the great
moral movement which swept Puritanism away in this country, tended, as
all reformers do, to the opposite extreme,--to that scepticism of evil
which, as George Brandes says, is greatly to the advantage of
hypocrites and sharpers. This was justifiable in Doctor Channing, but
among his followers it has often degenerated into an inverted or
homoeopathic kind of Puritanism,--a habit of excusing the faults of
others, or of themselves, on the score of good intentions--a habit of
self-justification, and even to the perverse belief that, as everything
is for the best, whatever we do in this world must be for good. To this
class of sentimentalists the most serious evil is truth-seeing and
truth-speaking. It is an excellent plan to look upon the bright side of
things, but one should not do this to the extent of blinding oneself to
facts. Doctor Johnson once said to Boswell, "Beware, my friend, of
mixing up virtue and vice;" but there is something worse than that, and
it is, to stigmatize a writer as a pessimist or a hypochondriac for
refusing to take rainbow-colored views. This, however, would never
apply to Longfellow.

Hawthorne, with his eye ever on the mark, pursued a middle course. He
separated himself from the Puritans without joining their opponents,
and thus attained the most independent stand-point of any American
writer of his time; and if this alienated him from the various
humanitarian movements that were going forward, it was nevertheless a
decided advantage for the work he was intended to do. In this respect
he resembled Scott, Thackeray and George Eliot.

What we call evil or sin is merely the negative of civilization,--a
tendency to return to the original savage condition. In the light of
history, there is always progress or improvement, but in individual
cases there is often the reverse, and so far as the individual is
concerned evil is no imaginary metaphor, but as real and absolute as
what we call good. The Bulgarian massacres of 1877 were a historical
necessity, and we console ourselves in thinking of them by the fact
that they may have assisted the Bulgarians in obtaining their
independence; but this was no consolation to the twenty or thirty
thousand human beings who were ground to powder there. To them there
was no comfort, no hope,--only the terrible reality. Neither can we
cast the responsibility of such events on the mysterious ways of
Providence. The ways of Providence are not so mysterious to those who
have eyes to read with. Take for instance one of the most notable cases
of depravity, that of Nero. If we consider the conditions under which
he was born and brought up, the necessity of that form of government to
hold a vast empire together, and the course of history for a hundred
years previous, it is not difficult to trace the genesis of Nero's
crimes to the greed of the Roman people (especially of its merchants)
for conquest and plunder; and Nero was the price which they were
finally called on to pay for this. Marcus Aurelius, a noble nature
reared under favorable conditions for its development, became the
Washington of his time.

It is the same in private life. In many families there are evil
tendencies, which if they are permitted to increase will take permanent
hold, like a bad demon, of some weak individual, and make of him a
terror and a torment to his relatives--fortunate if he is not in a
position of authority. He may serve as a warning to the general public,
but in the domestic circle he is an unmitigated evil,--he or she,
though it is not so likely to be a woman. When a crime is committed
within the precincts of good society, we are greatly shocked; but we do
not often notice the debasement of character which leads down to it,
and still more rarely notice the instances in which fear or some other
motive arrests demoralization before the final step, and leaves the
delinquent as it were in a condition of moral suspense.

It was in such tragic situations that Hawthorne found the material
which was best suited to the bent of his genius.

In the two volumes, however, of "Twice Told Tales,"--the second
published two years later,--the tragical element only appears as an
undercurrent of pathos in such stories as "The Gentle Boy,"
"Wakefield," "The Maypole of Merry-mount," and "The Haunted Mind," but
reaches a climax in "The Ambitious Guest" and "Lady Eleanor's Mantle."
There are others, like "Lights from a Steeple," and "Little Annie's
Ramble," that are of a more cheerful cast, but are also much less
serious in their composition. "The Minister's Black Veil," "The Great
Carbuncle," and "The Ambitious Guest," are Dantean allegories. We
notice that each volume begins with a highly patriotic tale, the "Gray
Champion," and "Howe's Masquerade," but the patriotism is genuine and
almost fervid.

When I first looked upon the house in which Hawthorne lived at Sebago,
I was immediately reminded of these earlier studies in human nature,
which are of so simple and quiet a diction, so wholly devoid of
rhetoric, that Elizabeth Peabody thought they must be the work of his
sister, and others supposed them to have been written by a Quaker. They
resemble Dürer's wood-cuts,--gentle and tender in line, but unswerving
in their fidelity. We sometimes wish that they were not so quiet and
evenly composed, and then repent of our wish that anything so perfect
should be different from what it is. His "Twice Told Tales" are a
picture-gallery that may be owned in any house-hold. They stand alone
in English, and there is not their like in any other language.

Yet Hawthorne is not a word-painter like Browning and Carlyle, but
obtains his pictorial effect by simple accuracy of description, a more
difficult process than the other, but also more satisfactory. His eyes
penetrate the masks and wrappings which cover human nature, as the
Röntgen rays penetrate the human body. He sees a man's heart through
the flesh and bones, and knows what is concealed in it. He ascends a
church-steeple, and looking down from the belfry the whole life of the
town is spread out before him. Men and women come and go--Hawthorne
knows the errands they are on. He sees a militia company parading
below, and they remind him from that elevation of the toy soldiers in a
shop-window,--which they turned out to be, pretty much, at Bull Run. A
fashionable young man comes along the street escorting two young
ladies, and suddenly at a crossing encounters their father, who takes
them away from him; but one of them gives him a sweet parting look,
which amply compensates him in its presage of future opportunities. How
plainly that consolatory look appears between our eyes and the printed
page! Then Hawthorne describes the grand march of a thunder-storm,--as
in Rembrandt's "Three Trees,"--with its rolling masses of dark vapor,
preceded by a skirmish-line of white feathery clouds. The militia
company is defeated at the first onset of this, its meteoric enemy, and
driven under cover. The artillery of the skies booms and flashes about
Hawthorne himself, until finally: "A little speck of azure has widened
in the western heavens; the sunbeams find a passage and go rejoicing
through the tempest, and on yonder darkest cloud, born like hallowed
hopes of the glory of another world and the trouble and tears of this,
brightens forth the rainbow." All this may have happened just as it is
set down.

"Lady Eleanor's Mantle" exemplifies the old proverb, "Pride goeth
before destruction," in almost too severe a manner, but the tale is
said to have a legendary foundation; and "The Minister's Black Veil" is
an equally awful symbolism for that barrier between man and man, which
we construct through suspicion and our lack of frankness in our
dealings with one another. We all hide ourselves behind veils, and, as
Emerson says, "Man crouches and blushes, absconds and conceals."

"The Ambitious Guest" allegorizes a vain imagination, and is the most
important of these three. A young man suffers from a craving for
distinction, which he believes will only come to him after this life is
ended. He is walking through the White Mountains, and stops overnight
at the house of the ill-fated Willey family. He talks freely on the
subject of his vain expectations, when Destiny, in the shape of an
avalanche, suddenly overtakes him, and buries him so deeply that
neither his body nor his name has ever been recovered. Hawthorne might
have drawn another allegory from the same source, for if the Willey
family had trusted to Providence, and remained in their house, instead
of rushing out into the dark, they would not have lost their lives.

In the _Democratic Review_ for 1834, Hawthorne published the
account of a visit to Niagara Falls, one of the fruits of his
expedition thither in September, 1832, by way of the White Mountains
and Burlington, the journey from Salem to Niagara in those days being
fully equal to going from New York to the cataracts of the Nile in our
own time. "The Ambitious Guest" was published in the same volume with
it, and "The Ontario Steamboat" first appeared in the _American
Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge_, in 1836. Hawthorne
may have made other expeditions to the White Mountains, but we do not
hear of them.

In addition to the three studies already mentioned, Hawthorne drew from
this source the two finest of his allegories, "The Great Carbuncle" and
"The Great Stone Face."

"The Great Carbuncle" is not only one of the most beautiful of
Hawthorne's tales, but the most far-reaching in its significance. The
idea of it must have originated in the Alpine glow, an effect of the
rising or setting sun on the icy peaks of a mountain, which looks at a
distance like a burning coal; an appearance only visible in the White
Mountains during the winter, and there is no reason why Hawthorne
should not have seen it at that season from Lake Sebago. At a distance
of twenty miles or more it blazes wonderfully, but on a nearer approach
it entirely disappears. Hawthorne could not have found a more
fascinating subject, and he imagines it for us as a great carbuncle
located in the upper recesses of the mountains.

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