Some passages from a copy of an article in “The North British Review” of Edinburgh during 1851 were capable of filling a wife's heart with exultation, and my mother quotes: “'The most striking features in these tales are the extraordinary skill and masterly care which are displayed in their composition. . . . It would be difficult to pick out a page which could be omitted without loss to the development of the narrative and the idea, which are always mutually illustrative to a degree not often attained in any species of modern art. . . . His language, though extraordinarily accurate, is always light and free. . . . We know of nothing equal to it, in its way [the portrayal of Dimmesdale], in the whole circle of English literature;' and much more in the same superlative vein.”
But if my father could weigh his artistic success with the precision of a coal-heaver, who will ever be able to weigh and gauge the genius which carries methods and philosophies and aims into an atmosphere of wonderful power, where the sunlight and the color and the lightning and frowning clouds transfigure the familiar things of life in glorious haste and inspiration? While following his rules and habits my father was constantly attended by the rapturous spirit of such a genius, transmuting swarming reality into a few symbolic types.
Another way in which he effected telling labor was to conserve his force in the matter of wrangling. He kept his temper. He was not without the fires of life, but he banked them. He did not permit disgust at others or at the adverse destiny of the moment to absorb his vitality, by throwing it off in long harangues of rage, long seasons of the sulks. There are no such good calculators as men of consummate genius. They dread the squandering of energy of an Edgar Allan Poe or of a boiling Walter Savage Landor. Temperateness implies the control of fierce elements; and in all management of volcanic power we perceive sweetness and beauty.
When my father handled sin, it became uncontaminating tragedy; when he handled vulgarity, as in “The Artist of the Beautiful,” it became inevitable pathos; when he handled suspicion, as in “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini's Daughter,” it evolved devoted trust.
The frequent question as to whether Hawthorne drew from his family or friends in portraying human nature shows an unfamiliarity with literary art. Portraiture is not art, in literature, though a great artist includes it, if he chooses, in the category of his productions. To any one permeated by the atmosphere of art (though not quite of it) as I was, it seems strange that a truly artistic work should be thought to be an imitation of individual models. The distance of inspiration is the distance of a heavenly fair day, or of a night made luminous by mystery, giving a new quality and a new species of delight to facts about us. In reading the sympathetic merriment of the introduction to “The Scarlet Letter,” and then the story itself, we perceive the difference between the charm of a Dutch-like realism and the thrill of imaginative creation, which uses material made incomprehensibly wonderful by God in order to make it comprehensibly wonderful to men. But, of course, the material thus transmuted by the distance of inspiration is only new and fine to men who have ears to hear and eyes to see. My father never imitated the men and women he met, nor man nor woman, and such conceptions of his way would bring us to a dense forest of mistake.
In the afternoon my father went, if practicable, into the open spaces of nature, or at least into the fresh air, to gather inspiration for his work. He had no better or stronger or more lavish aids than air and landscape, unless I except his cigar. He never, I think, smoked but one cigar a day, but it was of a quality to make up for this self-denial, and I am sure that he reserved his most puzzling literary involutions for the delicious half-hour of this dainty enjoyment.
In 1861 and thereafter he traversed, as has been said, the wooded hilltop behind his home, which was reached by various pretty climbing paths that crept under larches and pines, and scraggy, goat-like apple-trees. We could catch sight of him going back and forth up there, with now and then a pale blue gleam of sky among the trees, against which his figure passed clear. Along this path, made by his own steps only, he thought out the tragedy of “Septimius Felton,” who buried the young English officer at the foot of one of the large pines which my father saw at each return. At one end of the hilltop path was a thicket of birch and maple trees; and at the end towards the west and the village was the open brow of the hill, sloping rapidly to the Lexington Road, and overlooking meadows and distant wood-ranges, some of the cottages of humble folk, and the neighboring huge, owlet-haunted elms of Alcott's lawn. Along this path in spring huddled pale blue violets, of a blue that held sunlight, pure as his own eyes. Masses also of sweet-fern grew at the side of these abundant bordering violets, and spacious apartments of brown-floored pine groves flanked the sweet-fern, or receded a little before heaps of blackberry branches and simple flowers. My father's violets were the wonder of the year to us. We never saw so many of these broad, pale-petaled ones anywhere else, until the year of his death, when they greeted him with their celestial color as he was borne into Sleepy Hollow, as if in remembrance of his long companionship on The Wayside hill.
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 .
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 tha
t 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.”
Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) Page 692