in 1811, and had been an invalid through her girlhood; she was afflicted
with an acute nervous headache which lasted uninterruptedly, says her
son, from her twelfth to her thirty-first year, though the pain was not
so severe, her sister remarks, but that she could sometimes read. She
had received her education at home, mainly from her sister, who kept a
school in the house, and in spite of her ill-health had many and varied
acquisitions. She read Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was somewhat
familiar with history. Passages in her journal show the character and
range of her reading, which was of that strangely mixed sort that
belonged to the notion of culture in those days; thus, for instance, in
her twentieth year, she records having read on one day De Gťrando,
Fťnelon, St. Luke and Isaiah, Young, Addison, and four comedies of
Shakspere, besides doing some sewing. She was a good French and Italian
scholar. Filled with intellectual enthusiasm and ambition as she was,
her sensibilities seem rather to have been roused by natural beauty,
effects of sky and weather and color, and her active powers took the
direction of art; she sketched, painted, and modeled in clay. In 1832
she had gone to Cuba with her mother for three years, and received some
benefit from the climate. She had especially practiced horseback-riding
there, of which she was fond. No permanent improvement, however, had
followed, on her return to Salem in 1835. When Hawthorne came to know
her, she was living a half-invalid life, taking her meals in her own
room, which she had fitted up with artistic prettiness, and yet
suffering the full transcendental tide of culture and emotion. Perhaps
no single passage can better illustrate her mind and feelings than a
description of Emerson's call in the spring of 1838, which she writes to
her sister, whom, at an earlier time, he had taught Greek:--
"We had an exquisite visit from Waldo. It was the warbling of the Attic
bird. The gleam of his _diffused_ smile; the musical thunder of his
voice; his repose, so full of the essence of life; his simplicity--just
think of all these, and of my privilege in seeing and hearing him. He
enjoyed everything we showed him so much! He talked so divinely to
Raphael's Madonna del Pesce! I vainly imagined I was very quiet all the
while, preserving a very demure exterior, and supposed I was sharing his
oceanic calm. But the next day I was aware that I had been in a very
intense state. I told Mary, that night after he had gone, that I felt
like a _gem_; that was the only way I could express it. I don't
know what Mary hoped to get from him, but _I_ was sure of drinking
in that which would make me paint Cuban skies better than even my
recollections could have made me, were they as vivid as the rays of the
sun in that sunniest of climates. He made me feel as Eliza Dwight did
once, when she looked uncommonly beautiful and animated. I felt as if
her beauty was all about the room, and that I was in it, and therefore
beautiful too. It seemed just so with Waldo's soul-beauty."
She had been in communication with others of the leading spirits of that
day besides Emerson. Dr. Channing and Allston sent her messages, kindly
and flattering, about her drawings and painting. She had copied some of
Allston's pictures. Her studio was the centre of her life; and there her
friends "glided in," to use her phrase, with roses and columbines,
little girls came to take peeps at its wonders, and from it came the
sunshine of the house. Here, to give some further trifling indications,
she described herself, after a visit of Hawthorne, as feeling "quite
lark-like, or like John of Bologna's Mercury;" or she indulged one of
her "dearest visions," which was "to get well enough to go into prisons
and tell felons I have sympathy for them, especially women;" or, when
Hawthorne called, lamented that she should have to smooth her hair, and
dress, "while he was being wasted downstairs." She felt his attractive
power from the first, and was happy in his attentions, in the walks they
took, in their visits to Miss Burley's weekly meetings, in the picture
of Ilbrahim, "The Gentle Boy," which she made for him, in her story,
"Edward Randolph's Portrait," which he wrote for her, in the columbines
and tulips that strewed the way of love-making, and, in brief, in the
thousand trifles of the old story. Hawthorne, on his part, was equally
attracted in his different ways, and responded to the vivacity and
ebullience of this intense feminine nature disclosed to him in the live
woman who had met him, as if coming out of a vision, on life's road. The
spring budded and flowered into summer, and when he took his habitual
journey into the world,--this time into Berkshire and Vermont, from July
23 to September 24,--meaning, as he told her, to cut himself wholly away
from every one, so that even his mother should not know his whereabouts,
it is not unlikely that he was desirous of this solitude to think it all
over.
They became engaged at the close of the year, though the matter was kept
a profound secret, there being apparently some apprehension that his
mother would not approve of it. His sister Elizabeth, was, perhaps, not
very cordial about it, also, but there was, as it proved, no occasion
for anxiety. It might well have seemed imprudent for Hawthorne, whose
worldly success had been slight, to marry an invalid wife. Fortune,
however, was not wholly unkind, and George Bancroft, whose attention had
been called to Hawthorne's needs, gave him an appointment at the Boston
Custom House as weigher and gauger, at a salary of twelve hundred
dollars. It was this opportunity, possibly, which emboldened Hawthorne
to take the final step; and marriage would be hoped for, should this
experiment of entering on a fixed employment prove successful.
During the progress of this courtship, to complete the chronicle of
Hawthorne's literary publications, he had written the carrier's address,
"Time's Portraiture," for "The Salem Gazette," January 2, 1838, the home
paper which had made him known to his fellow-townsmen by reprinting "The
Fountain of Youth," in the preceding March; and for the same paper he
wrote the address for the following year, January 1, 1839, "The Sister
Years." He had also contributed to "The American Monthly Magazine," for
January, 1838. an article under his own name on his friend, Thomas Green
Fessenden, a Maine politician who had recently died; and to the same
periodical, for March, "The Three-fold Destiny" under the old pseudonym
of Ashley Allen Royce. It was, however, "The Democratic Review" which
served as the principal channel of publication. It contained
successively "Footprints on the Beach," January; "Snowflakes," February;
"Howe's Masquerade," May; "Edward Randolph's Portrait," July; "Lady
Eleanore's Mantle," "Chippings with a Chisel," and a sketch of Jonathan
Cilley, his friend who had just been shot by Graves in a duel, all in
September; and these tales he signed as by The Author of "Twice-Told
Tales." The Province House series was concluded by "Old Esther Dudley,"
in this same periodical, April, 1839, and to this he affixed his own
name for the first time. "The Lily's Quest" had appeared, January 19,
1839. in "The Southern Rose," published at Charleston, South Carolina.
Here the first stage of his literary career ended.
He was now to leave that chamber under the eaves, in which these years,
lengthened to fourteen now, had been spent, but not without a farewell.
Here he had written, in 1835, "In this dismal chamber fame was won." A
dismal sort of fame he thought it then. It was on returning to it in
1840 that he penned the well-known passage:--
"Here I sit in my old, accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days
gone by.... Here I have written many tales,--many that have been burned
to ashes, many that doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be
called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have
appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the
world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great
mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely
youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and
here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And
here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know
me, and sometimes wondering why it did not know me sooner, or whether it
would ever know me at all,--at least, till I were in my grave. And
sometimes it seemed as if I were already in the grave, with only life
enough to be chilled and benumbed. But oftener I was happy,--at least,
as happy as I then knew how to be, or was aware of the possibility of
being. By and by, the world found me out in my lonely chamber, and
called me forth,--not, indeed, with a loud roar of acclamation, but
rather with a still, small voice,--and forth I went, but found nothing
in the world that I thought preferable to my old solitude till now....
And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many years in this
lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the viewless bolts
and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the world, I should
have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly dust, and my
heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the
multitude.... But living in solitude till the fullness of time was come,
I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart.... I
used to think I could imagine all passions, all feelings, and states of
the heart and mind; but how little did I know!... Indeed, we are but
shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all that seems most real
about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream,--till the heart be
touched. That touch creates us,--then we begin to be,--thereby we are
beings of reality and inheritors of eternity."
This sentiment always continued to play about this room, and whenever he
returned to it he was apt to set down some word of memory. In one
passage he even describes it as a shrine of literary pilgrimage, and
mentions, with that well-known touch, half fantastic, half grotesque,
its various articles of furniture,--the washstand, the mahogany-framed
glass, the pine table, the flag-bottomed chair, the old chest of
drawers, the closet, the worn-out shoe-brush, imagining the thoughts of
the pilgrim on beholding these relics. It was the type for him of the
old life of loneliness, of disappointment, of household gloom; but it
was also the place where he had spent those "tranquil and not unhappy
years," of which he afterwards said these early tales were the
memorials; and, however the room might darken in comparison with the
happiness of his married life, his last thought in regard to it was that
contained in a letter written late in life: "I am disposed to thank God
for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of
adversity came then, when I bore it alone."
III.
WEIGHER, GAUGER, AND FARMER.
Early in January, 1839, Hawthorne took up his new duties as weigher and
gauger in the Boston Custom House. He wrote very cheerfully to
Longfellow that he had no reason to doubt his capacity to fulfill his
duties, since he had not yet learned what they were, and he indulges his
humor in fancying imaginary little essays which he will write in the
unoccupied time he pleasantly anticipates will be his lot. He was glad
to have a material task to do, something with the stubbornness of fact
in its resistance, a practical duty such as belongs in the ordinary
lives of men. This desire to come out of his old way of existence, with
its preoccupation with the imaginary world, had become a strong and
rooted feeling, a fixed idea. "If I could only make tables," he said, "I
should feel myself more of a man." In the bustle of the wharves he felt
himself in touch with the world's business, and he took hold of his work
with interest and vigor as well as with that conscientious fidelity
which belonged to his character. Bancroft, a few months later, told
Emerson that he was "the most efficient and best of the Custom House
officers," and Mr. Lathrop says that he "used to make it a point in all
weathers to get to the wharf at the earliest possible hour," so that the
laborers, who were employed by the hour, might not lose their time. The
life he led is fully described in his own journals, with all its details
of shipping business, of the sailors and laborers and their tasks, of
the salt, salt fish, oil, iron, molasses, and other inelegant
merchandise, and the day's work in its various aspects of character,
things, and weather. Hawthorne's powers of observation, which he had
previously exercised in the taverns of New England and along his native
roadside and beaches, were now fully occupied and newly animated with
the novelty of the scene and his part in it. He made these careful notes
almost by instinct, but after all, they were of curiously little use to
him; it would seem rather that they gave his mind occupation in the
intervals of his imaginative creation; they were a resource to him like
the recreation of a walk; they represent the vacant and idle times of
his genius; and for this reason his observations, which are in the main
a kind of admirable reporting, afford a well-nigh complete setting for
his life, and constitute an external autobiography. He is hardly to be
truly seen apart from them.
At the end of six months he had begun to feel the wearisome drag upon
his spirits which was to be expected from toilsome days. Practical life
as a sort of vacation was welcome, but as it became the continuing
business of his time, and that other world of the artistic faculty was
now, in turn, known only by visiting glimpses, the look of the facts
changed. "I do not mean to imply," he writes, "that I am unhappy or
discontented, for this is not the case. My life only is a burden in the
same way that it is to every toilsome man; and mine is a healthy
weariness, such as needs only a night's sleep to remove it. But from
henceforth forever I shall be entitled to call the sons of toil my
brethren, and shall know how to sympathize with them, seeing that I
likewise have risen at the dawn, and borne the fervor of the midday sun,
nor turned my heavy footsteps homeward till eventide." At first, no
doubt, the outdoor occupation and the having to do with sea and harbor
life, for which he had an hereditary affection, were important elements
in his happiness; and the association with rough and hardy men, whose
contact with life was primitive and had the genuineness and health of
such occupations, was the kind of human companionship which he felt most
naturally and pleasurably. But the wearing in of the facts upon him is
seen in the way in which the blackness of coal and the whiteness of salt
begin to color the page, until it would seem as if he handled and saw no
other objects, and also in the comfort that the cold sea-wind, and
freshening waves, and the horizon of cloud and green are to him. At the
end of a year the signs of weariness come out clear in a well-known
passage of the "Note-Books," as a condensed picture of these two years
of life:--
"I have been measuring coal all day, on board of a black little British
schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the
time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for the wind (northeast, I
believe) blew up through the dock, as if it had been the pipe of a pair
of bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more
delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts
and timbers, half immersed in the water, and covered with ice, which the
rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them, so that they
looked like immense icicles. Across the water, however, not more than
half a mile off, appeared the Bunker Hill monument; and, what interested
me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a clock upon
it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary hours.
Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the schooner, and
warmed myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels, pots and
kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts,--my
olfactories, meanwhile, being greatly refreshed by the odor of a pipe,
which the captain or some one of his crew was smoking. But at last came
the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon the islands;
and I blessed it, because it was the signal of my release."
He soon began to "pray that in one year more I may find some way of
escaping from this unblest Custom House; for it is a very grievous
thralldom;" and beginning now to write again, he feels as if "the
noblest part of man had been left out of my composition or had decayed
out of it since my nature was given to my own keeping." Yet he tries to
be just to his experience, and adds what he thought the good of it had
been:--
"It is only once in a while that the image and desire of a better and
happier life makes me feel the iron of my chain; for, after all, a human
spirit may find no insufficiency of food fit for it, even in the Custom
House. And, with such materials as these, I do think and feel and learn
things that are worth knowing, and which I should not know unless I had
learned them there, so that the present portion of my life shall not be
quite left out of the sum of my real existence.... It is good for me, on
many accounts, that my life has had this passage in it. I know much more
than I did a year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man
among men. I have gained worldly wisdom, and wisdom also that is not
altogether of this world. And, when I quit this earthly cavern, where I
am now buried, nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind."
The rebellion, nevertheless, continued, and as the spring came on the
Custom House is a "darksome dungeon," where he "murders the joyful young
day," quenching the sunshine; when he shall be free again, he thinks, he
will enjoy all things anew like a child of five, and "go forth and stand
in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on me
shall be washed away at once, and my heart will be like a bank of fresh
flowers for the weary to rest upon." He goes to the Common, to the
highest point, where he could "see miles and miles into the country.
Blessed be God for this green tract, and the view which it affords,
whereby we poor citizens may be put in mind, sometimes, that all his
earth is not composed of blocks of brick houses, and of stone or wooden
pavements. Blessed be God for the sky, too, though the smoke of the city
may somewhat change its aspect,--but still it is better than if each
street were covered over with a roof. There were a good many people
walking the mall,--mechanics apparently, and shopkeepers' clerks, with
their wives; and boys were rolling on the grass, and I would have liked
to lie down and roll too."
He looks out over the waters. "The footsteps of May can be traced upon
the islands in the harbor, and I have been watching the tints of green
upon them gradually deepening, till now they are almost as beautiful as
they ever can be." He is convinced that "Christian's burden consisted of
coal," and he takes comfort in salt: "Salt is white and pure--there is
something holy in salt." Yet this tone was not constant, and from time
to time he shows something of his first appreciation and enjoyment of
the element of labor and reality in the experience. Almost at the end of
his life on the wharf, after more than two years of it, he exemplifies
his later feeling perhaps most justly:--
"I have been busy all day, from early breakfast-time till late in the
afternoon; and old Father Time has gone onward somewhat less heavily
than is his wont when I am imprisoned within the walls of the Custom
House. It has been a brisk, breezy day, an effervescent atmosphere, and
I have enjoyed it in all its freshness,--breathing air which had not
been breathed in advance by the hundred thousand pairs of lungs which
have common and invisible property in the atmosphere of this great city.
My breath had never belonged to anybody but me. It came fresh from the
wilderness of ocean.... It was exhilarating to see the vessels, how they
bounded over the waves, while a sheet of foam broke out around them. I
found a good deal of enjoyment, too, in the busy scene around me; for
several vessels were disgorging themselves (what an unseemly figure is
this,--'disgorge,' quotha, as if the vessel were sick) on the wharf, and
everybody seemed to be working with might and main. It pleased me to
think that I also had a part to act in the material and tangible
business of this life, and that a portion of all this industry could not
have gone on without my presence. Nevertheless, I must not pride myself
too much on my activity and utilitarianism. I shall, doubtless, soon
bewail myself at being compelled to earn my bread by taking some little
share in the toils of mortal men."
The truth was that Hawthorne led a life apart in his own genius, and
this life of the spirit rose out of his daily and habitual existence, or
flowed through it like a hidden stream, and did not mingle with the tide
of the hours as they passed. He felt the need of a fuller, earthly,
practical life, a real life, as he would have called it by contrast with
the impalpable things of his genius, and sought it in outward
employments; but in these, when his spirit awoke, he felt himself a
captive, and defrauded of that higher life of the soul; and after the
day's work or the year's labor was over, he could not be content with
the fact that it had been, and had served its purpose, and was gone, but
he still was compelled to ask how it had served this higher life, in
what ways it had fed the spirit which should be master of all the days
of one's life, and he found no satisfactory answer except the crude one
that possibly his experience and observation might be useful, though
doubtfully, as material for the books that were to be. After all he was
not content with practical life as an end; it was a means only, such was
the necessity of his constitution; he felt its interference with his
creative faculty and he was far from being convinced that he had gained
anything from it which would be fruitful when he should find time and
strength to write again. The leisure he had fondly anticipated was only
a dream. He had to work too hard.
During these two years, from January, 1839, to April, 1841, the other
part of Hawthorne's life lay in his companionship with Sophia Peabody.
At first, communication was mostly by letters; but the Peabodys removed
from Salem to Boston in 1840, and after that the two lovers--for they
were lovers in the most simple sense--met constantly. The memorials of
the time, touching as they are in their intimacy of feeling, have that
essential privacy which best bespeaks a noble nature. The exchanges of
confidences, the little gifts, such as the two pictures which she sent
him and which he always held so preciously in his affection, the trifles
of lovers' talk, like his confession that he always washed his hands
before reading her letters, the quiet, firm advice, the consolations,
the happy praise he renders her,--all these belong to the love-story, if
it must needs be told. But, besides this, Hawthorne felt toward this
love of his married life in a peculiar way not often so purely
disclosed; there were touches of solemnity in it, something not of this
world; there was that sense of what can be described only as sacredness,
which he intimates and in part reveals as a thing never absent from his
heart, whether with her or away from her. Love had come to him, not in
his youth, but after the years of solitude had ripened both heart and
imagination,--a man's love; it filled his whole nature, and with it went
a feeling of glad release from the past, of the coming of a freeing
power bringing new life, which gave something of heavenly gratitude to
his bosom. How deep, serious, truly sacred, his love was, can be read in
all the lines of his writing that even remotely allude to it; and at
this time he gave expression to it with a sincerity so unconscious that
in reading his letters--and there are many of them, though happily he
destroyed his wife's--one looks straight into his heart. It is strange,
he thinks, that "such a flower as our affection should have blossomed
amid snow and wintry winds;" and in all ways this love had the
singularity that deep natures feel in their own experiences. "I never
till now," writes Hawthorne, "had a friend who could give me repose; all
have disturbed me, and whether for pleasure or pain, it was still
disturbance. But peace overflows from your heart into mine." So one
might weave the chain of lovers' phrases, linking the old words over;
but here, at least, it will be enough to let one or two separate
passages stand for his abiding mood. In June, 1840, he writes to her
when she is at Concord:--