PASSAGES FROM THE LETTERS AND THE UNFINISHED ROMANCES
TO HORATIO BRIDGE, OCTOBER 1861
I have not found it possible to occupy my mind with its usual trash and nonsense, during these anxious times; but as the autumn advances, I find myself sitting down to my desk, and blotting successive sheets of paper, as of yore. Very likely I may have something ready for the public, long before the public is ready to receive it.
FROM “THE AMERICAN CLAIMANT”
This grave yard (we are sorry to have to treat of such a disagreeable piece of ground; but everybody’s business centres there, at one time or another) was the most ancient in the town. The dust of the original Englishmen had become incorporated with the soils of those Englishmen whose immediate predecessors had been resolved into the earth about the country churches, the little Norman, square, battlemented stone towers, of the villages in the old land; so that, in this point of view, as holding bones and dust of the first ancestors, this grave yard was more English than anything else in town. There had been hidden from sight many a broad, bluff visage, of husbandmen that had ploughed the rich English soil; there the faces of noted men, now known in history; there many a personage whom tradition told about, making wondrous qualities of strength and courage for him;—all these, mingled with succeeding generations, turned up and battened down again with the sexton’s spade; until every blade of grass was human, more than vegetable; for a hundred and fifty years will do this; and so much time, at least, had elapsed since the first little mound was piled up in the virgin soil. Old tombs there were too, with armorial sculptures on them, and quaint, mossy grave-stones; although all kinds of monumental appendages were of a date more recent than the time of the first settlers, who had been content with wooden memorials, if any, the sculptor’s art not having then reached New England. Thus rippled, surged, broke, about the house, this dreary grave-yard, which made the street gloomy; so that people did not like to pass the dark high wooden fence, with its closed gate, that separated it from the street; and this old house was one that cornered upon it, and took up the ground that would otherwise have been sown as thickly with dead as the rest of the lot; so that it seemed hardly possible but that the dead people should get up out of their graves and come in there to warm themselves. But, in truth, I never heard a whisper of its being haunted.
TO FRANCIS BENNOCH, LONDON, OCTOBER 1862
I wish you could come and see us; for I don’t expect ever to see England again. I did think that I might come over with a new Romance, the English copyright of which would pay Mrs. Hawthorne’s and my own expences for a year; but it is impossible to possess one’s mind in the midst of a civil war to such a degree as to make thoughts assume life. I hear the cannon and smell the gunpowder through everything. Besides, I feel as if this great convulsion were going to make an epoch in our literature as in everything else (if it does not annihilate all,) and that when we emerge from the war-cloud, there will be another and better (at least, a more national and seasonable) class of writers than the one I belong to. So be it. I do not reckon literary reputation as a heavy item on the debtor side of my account with Providence;—indeed, I never realized that I had any at all, and am in doubt about it now.
FROM “THE ELIXIR OF LIFE”
But Septimius’s mind, we readily say, was not in a healthy state. His sombre imagination, excited by the late singular incidents, brooded over all his daily life, and made false things and true look alike in its shadow. Then the great war, in which the whole country was so desperately engaged, had an influence on poor Septimius, modified by the morbidness and extravagance of his character; for he, like all others, drank of the prevalent passion and excitement, drained the cup that was offered to everybody’s lips, but was intoxicated in his own peculiar mode. He walked so much the more wildly on his own course, because the people were rushing enthusiastically on another. In times of Revolution, or whatever public disturbance, even the calmest person is, to some degree, in an exaggerated and unnatural state, most probably without suspecting it; there is enthusiasm, there is madness in the atmosphere. The decorous rule of common life is suspended; absurdities come in, and stalk unnoticed. Mad-men walk abroad unrecognized. Heroic virtue marches among us, with majestic step; vices, too, and great crimes, creep darkly, or stalk abroad. Woman, likewise, catches the wild influence, and sometimes, flinging aside her fireside virtues as of little worth, is capable of crimes that man shudders at, of virtues and valor that he can never imitate, of deeds and thoughts that she would, a little time ago, have died to anticipate; the disenfranchised soul exults at losing its standpoint; old laws are annulled; anything may come to pass; miracles are on the same ground as the commonest occurrence. So, in respect to Septimius, his common sense, of which he had no small portion, had no such fair play with his wilder characteristics as it might have in quiet and ordinary times; when besides, there were the throes attending the birth of a new epoch in the world; and among seething opinions and systems, and overturned and deposed principles, Septimius had nothing fixed and recognized with which to compare his own pursuit, and recognize its absurdity. Thus must we say, that this young wild thinker may not look too ridiculous in the errors to which a solitary pursuit led him.
TO JAMES T. FIELDS, OCTOBER 1863
I can’t tell you when to expect an instalment of the Romance, if ever. There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be encountered, if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a sunshiny book.
FROM “THE ELIXIR OF LIFE”
Various interruptions kept him from further examination of the manuscript, during the day; for it may be observed, that a man no sooner sets his heart on any object, great or small, be it the lengthening out of his life interminably, or merely writing a romance about it, than his fellow beings, and fate and circumstance to back them, seem to conspire to hinder, to prevent, to throw in each his obstacle, great or small according to his power. In the original composition and organic purpose of the world, there is certainly some principle to obviate great success; some provision that nothing particularly worth doing shall ever get done; so inevitably does a mistiness settle between us and any such object, and harden into granite when we attempt to pass through it; so strongly do mocking voices call us back, or encouraging ones cease to be heard, when our sinking hearts need them most; so unaccountably, at last, when we feel as if we might grasp our life-long object by merely stretching out our hand, does it all at once put on an aspect of not being worth our grasp; by such apparently feeble impediments are our hands subtly bound; so hard is it to stir to-day, while it looks as if it would be easy to stir to purpose tomorrow; so strongly do petty necessities insist upon being compared with immortal desirablenesses, and almost always succeed practically in making us feel that they are of the most account. This being the case, Septimius had no such individual cause of grumbling against his stars as he supposed, on the score of the little tormenting incidents that assailed him, that day.
TO JAMES T. FIELDS, DECEMBER 1863
I have not yet read the proof-sheet [for “A Scene from the Dolliver Romance”], but will set about it soon, though with terrible reluctance—such as I never felt before.
FROM “THE ELIXIR OF LIFE”
It has often seemed to me that winter is the active time, in New England, to the intellectual laborer; whether because the outward world presents so few inducements to tempt him beyond the fireside, the woodland walks being choked up, the lake and river frozen, the garden calling him to no gentle toil, all being waste and white; so that, as in a bottle of generous wine in those zeroic times, all the watery parts are congealed, but the strength and richness of the wine still remains liquid and potent, in a small quantity in the centre of the bottle; so with the mind, it becomes a fiery power, and is capable of better things in the hard frost, because it has fewer things to enjoy, and so gets a stern and manful enjoyment out of its own action. The qu
ality of the air, too, the sparkling north-west, puts the intellect upon its mettle, by its brisk hostility; deferring any sybaritic mood, and making friends with you only when you face it, and then, in a few deep draughts, giving you life and courage on the hill-top for many hours thereafter; and then the snowy atmosphere, when all the air is full of flakes, and the sun shrouded, and the whole universe turned to snow, covering deeply the earth, lying on the roofs, the window sills, the boughs of the trees, clinging half-way up the window panes; slowly melting on the great logs that he had heaped on the hearth, and hissing on the hot bricks; compassed here, in this little space of warmth, he became full of activity. That crumbly, yellow, scrawly manuscript, with its infirm old texture, that could scarcely bear to be handled, lest it should turn to so much dust, and little scraps, with one or two illegible scratches of an ancient pen on each. What voluminous thought, what intense mental life, it was the cause of, so many ages after the hand that wrote it was (or at least ought to have been, for the fact was a matter of doubt with Septimius) crumbled into dust. It is not essential, just now, to explain what discoveries he deduced himself; but, by bringing the focus of all his powers to bear upon the manuscript, as upon a stubbornly resisting substance in the focus of a lens, he had unquestionably succeeded in getting a meaning out of most of those mystic pages; although, so well skilled were ancient writers in the sublime art of hiding meanings under a veil of words, while seeming to reveal them—weaving only a thicker garment out of the very light which they throw around a subject—that he was not perhaps fully satisfied with his achievement. He began to think, indeed, that it would require all science, all learning fully to comprehend what was written in this little space; so impossible was it to grasp this flower, and pull it up out of the remainder of human knowledge, its roots being so deep in the soil, and so intertwined with the heart-strings of the Universe. It is, I presume, in this way that a man’s peculiar branch of study often seems to him of such paramount importance to all others; because, when he gives a tug at it, hoping to pull it up, he feels the whole soil quake around him, and so convinces himself (and with a certain correctness) to have grappled with the whole universe in that one thing. So it is ever with what seems an idle tale, that, too, slight as it is, wreathes its tendrils about human knowledge, belief, superstitions, hopes, efforts, and, being taken only for a flower growing wild on a hill-side, with a fragrance of its own, we find that we have life and death, and burdens, and all the questions that men ever argued about, twining with its tendrils, so that here, too, we have hold of the moral universe.
TO HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, JANUARY 1864
I have been much out of sorts of late, and do not well know what is the matter with me, but am inclined to draw the conclusion that I shall have little more to do with pen and ink. One more book I should like well enough to write, and have indeed begun it, but with no assurance of ever bringing it to an end. As is always the case, I have a notion that this last book would be my best; and full of wisdom about matters of life and death—and yet it will be no deadly disappointment if I am compelled to drop it. You can tell, far better than I, whether there is ever anything worth having a literary reputation, and whether the best achievements seem to have any substance after they grow cold.
FROM “THE ELIXIR OF LIFE”
Doctor Dolliver, a worthy personage of extreme antiquity, was aroused rather prematurely, one summer morning, by the shouts of the child Pansie, in an adjoining chamber, summoning Old Martha (who performed the duties of nurse, housekeeper, and kitchen-maid, in the Doctor’s establishment) to take up her little ladyship and dress her. The old gentleman woke with more than his customary alacrity, and, after taking a moment to gather his wits about him, pulled aside the faded moreen curtains of his ancient bed, and thrust his head into a beam of sunshine that caused him to wink and withdraw it again. This transitory glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a flannel nightcap, fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair, and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage, which was crossed and criss-crossed with a record of his long life in wrinkles, faithfully written, no doubt, but with such cramped chirography of Father Time that the purport was illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch to get out of bed any more, and bring his forlorn shadow into the summer day that was made for younger folks. The Doctor, however, was by no means of that opinion, being considerably encouraged towards the toil of living twenty-four hours longer by the comparative ease with which he found himself going through the usually painful process of bestirring his rusty joints, (stiffened by the very rest and sleep that should have made them pliable) and putting them in a condition to bear his weight upon the floor. Nor was he absolutely disheartened by the idea of those tonsorial, ablutionary, and personally decorative labors, which are apt to become so intolerably irksome to an old gentleman, after performing them daily and duly for fifty, sixty, or seventy years, and finding them still as immitigably recurrent as at first. Dr. Dolliver could nowise account for this happy condition of his spirits and physical energies, until he remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain cordial, which was long ago prepared by his grandson, and carefully sealed up in a bottle, and had been reposited in a dark closet among a parcel of effete medicines, ever since that gifted young man’s death.
“It may have wrought effect upon me,” thought the doctor, shaking his head, as he lifted it again from the pillow. “It may be so; for poor Cornelius oftentimes instilled a strange efficacy into his perilous drugs. But I will rather believe it to be the operation of God’s mercy, which may have temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie’s sake.”
A twinge of his familiar rheumatism as he put his foot out of bed, taught him that he must not reckon too confidently upon even a day’s respite from the intrusive family of aches and infirmities, which, with their proverbial fidelity to attachments once formed, had long been the closest acquaintances that the poor old gentleman had in the world. Nevertheless, he fancied the twinge a little less poignant than those of yesterday; and, moreover, after stinging him pretty smartly, it passed gradually off with a thrill, which, in its latter stages, grew to be almost agreeable. Pain is but pleasure too strongly emphasized. With cautious movements, and only a groan or two, the good doctor transferred himself from the bed to the floor, where he stood awhile, gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to another (such as stiff-backed Mayflower chairs, an oaken chest of drawers, carved cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of foliage, a table with multitudinous legs, a family-record in faded embroidery, a shelf of black-bound books, a dusty heap of gallipots and phials in a dim corner,)—gazing at these things and steadying himself by the bed-post, while his inert brain, still partially benumbed with sleep, came slowly into accordance with the realities about him. The object which most helped to bring Dr. Dolliver completely to his waking perceptions was one that common observers might suppose to have been snatched bodily out of his dreams. The same sunbeam that had dazzled the doctor between the bed-curtains, glimmered on the weather-beaten gilding which had once adorned this mysterious symbol, and showed it to be an enormous serpent, twining round a wooden post, and reaching quite from the floor of the chamber to its ceiling.
It was evidently a thing that could boast of considerable antiquity, the dry-rot having eaten out its eyes and gnawed away the tip of its tail; and it must have stood long exposed to the atmosphere, for a kind of grey moss had partially overspread its tarnished gilt surface, and a swallow, or other familiar little bird, in some by-gone summer, seemed to have built its nest in the yawning and exaggerated mouth. It looked like a kind of manichean idol, which might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century or so, enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air, until the impious sect perished from among men—all save old Dr. Dolliver, who had set up the monster in his bed-chamber for the convenience of private devotion. But we are unpardonable i
n suggesting such a fantasy to the prejudice of our venerable friend, knowing him to have been as pious and upright a Christian, and with as little of the serpent in his character, as ever came of Puritan lineage. Not to make a further mystery about a very simple matter, this bedimmed and rotten reptile was once the medical emblem or apothecary’s sign of the famous Dr. Swinnerton, who practised physic in the earlier days of New England, when a head of Æsculapius or Hippocrates, would have vexed the souls of the righteous as savoring of Heathendom. The ancient dispenser of drugs had therefore set up an image of the Brazen Serpent, and followed his business for many years, with great credit, under this Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver, being the apprentice, pupil, and humble friend of the learned Swinnerton’s old age, had inherited the symbolic snake, and much other valuable property, by his bequest.
While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes, he took care to stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system and yet made him shiver; his wintry veins rejoiced at it, though the reviving blood tingled through them with a half-painful and only half-pleasurable titillation. For the first few moments after creeping out of bed, he kept his back to the sunny window and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing thitherward; but as the June fervor pervaded him more and more thoroughly, he turned bravely about, and looked forth at a burial ground on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old acquaintance, who had gone to sleep with the flavor of Dr. Dolliver’s tinctures and powders upon his tongue; it was the patient’s final bitter taste of this world, and perhaps doomed to be a recollected nauseousness in the next. Yesterday, in the chill of his forlorn old age, the doctor expected soon to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet community, and might scarcely have shrunk from the prospect on his own account; except, indeed, that he dreamily mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with the repose of the approaching one, being haunted by a notion that the damp earth, under the grass and dandelions, must needs be pernicious for his cough and his rheumatism. But, this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the mere taste of his grandson’s cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people, had caused an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to expand.
The Portable Hawthorne (Penguin Classics) Page 45