the coal-dust, and the steaming docks, and the thick-pated, stubborn,
contentious men, with whom I brawl from morning till night, and all the
weary toil that quite engrosses me, and yet occupies only a small part
of my being, which I did not know existed before I became a measurer. I
do think I should sink down quite disheartened and inanimate if you were
not happy, and gathering from earth and sky enjoyment for both of us;
but this makes me feel that my real, innermost soul is apart from all
these unlovely circumstances, and that it has not ceased to exist, as I
might sometimes suspect, but is nourished and kept alive through you.
You know not what comfort I have in thinking of you amid those beautiful
scenes and amid those sympathizing hearts. If you are well and happy, if
your step is light and joyous there, and your cheek is becoming rosier,
and if your heart makes pleasant music, then is it not better for you to
stay there a little longer? And if better for you, is it not so for me
likewise? Now, I do not press you to stay, but leave it all to your
wisdom; and if you feel it is now time to come home, then let it be so."
Similarly, in the fall of the same year, from Boston, and again from
Salem, he sums in memory what this new life had been to him now for
nearly two years:--
"Sometimes, during my solitary life in our old Salem house, it seemed to
me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive; for I had
no wife then to keep my heart warm. But, at length, you were revealed to
me, in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own. I drew nearer and
nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will
remain forever, keeping my heart warm and renewing my life with your
own. You only have taught me that I have a heart,--you only have thrown
a light, deep downward and upward, into my soul. You only have revealed
me to myself; for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would
have been merely to know my own shadow,--to watch it flickering on the
wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions....
"Whenever I return to Salem, I feel how dark my life would be without
the light that you shed upon it,--how cold, without the warmth of your
love. Sitting in this chamber, where my youth wasted itself in vain, I
can partly estimate the change that has been wrought. It seems as if the
better part of me had been born since then. I had walked those many
years in darkness, and might so have walked through life, with only a
dreamy notion that there was any light in the universe, if you had not
kissed my eyelids and given me to see. You, dearest, have always been
positively happy. Not so I,--I have only not been miserable."
To turn to other matters, the preoccupation of Hawthorne's mind with his
business, together with the distraction of his courtship, proved
unfavorable to imaginative work. It may be, too, that the impulse to
create had been somewhat exhausted by the rapid production of his later
tales in the year or two preceding. Only one original story appeared in
this period of labor and love, "John Inglefield's Thanksgiving," which
was published in the "Democratic Review" for March, 1840, as by the Rev.
A. A. Royce. An interesting edition of "The Gentle Boy," [Footnote:
_The Gentle Boy._ A Thrice Told Tale. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. With
an Original Illustration. Boston: Weeks, Jordan & Co., 121 Washington
Street. New York & London: Wiley & Putnam. 1839. 4to. Pp. 20.] under
Hawthorne's name, had been issued in 1839 at his own expense; it
contained the original sketch of Ibrahim, by Sophia Peabody, engraved by
J. Andrews, and was evidently intended only as a kind of lover's gift to
her, to whom it was dedicated. He gave his attention now to writing some
children's books, partly under the influence of his old "Peter Parley"
instruction and experience, and partly, no doubt, under the
encouragement and advice of Elizabeth Peabody, who was interested in
such literature. The Peabodys, on removing to Boston, had opened a shop,
a library and book-store and homoeopathic drug-store, all in one, of
which she was the head, and with her name Hawthorne associated his new
ventures. He had contemplated writing children's books, as a probable
means of profit, before he received his appointment in the Custom House,
as he said in his letter to Longfellow; and he merely stuck to the plan
under the new conditions. The result was three volumes of historical
tales for young people, drawn from New England in the colonial and
revolutionary times, under different titles, but making one series:
"Grandfather's Chair," [Footnote: _Grandfather's Chair._ A History
for Youth. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston:
E. P. Peabody. New York: Wiley & Putnam. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 140. The
preface is dated Boston, November, 1840.] "Famous Old People,"
[Footnote: _Famous Old People._ Being the Second Epoch of
Grandfather's Chair. By Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales.
Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West St. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 158. The preface
is dated December 30, 1840.] and "Liberty Tree." [Footnote: _Liberty
Tree._ With the Last Words of Grandfather's Chair. By Nathaniel
Hawthorne, author of Twice-Told Tales. Boston: E. P. Peabody, 13 West
St. 1841. 32mo. Pp. vii, 160. The preface is dated Boston, February 27,
1841.] They appeared in rapid succession in 1841, and were successful.
But notwithstanding the high character of these little books as
entertainment for children, it will hardly be thought that literature
had profited much by the devotion of genius to coal and salt and the
oversight of day laborers.
In the spring of 1841, immediately after the change of administration in
March, Hawthorne lost his place in the Custom House, and he at once
betook himself to Brook Farm, in Roxbury, a suburb of Boston, or, to
give its full name, "The Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and
Education." The place, the celebrities who gathered there in their
youth, and their way of life, have all been many times described, so
that there is no occasion to renew a detailed account, especially as
Hawthorne's interest in the scheme was purely incidental. He must have
had his plans already made in preparation for a change in his life. The
shop of the Peabodys in Boston was a centre of transcendentalism, "The
Dial" being published there; and Hawthorne's attention may have been
drawn to the movement for a practical application of the new social
ideas by this circumstance, and he may well have made the acquaintance
of Ripley, the chief projector, through these family friends. It is to
be remembered, too, that he had been interested previously in the
community idea, in the case of the Shakers, and had twice written tales
on motives suggested by their life. But an experiment in the
regeneration of society by a group of radicals would hardly have given
him much practical concern, had it not fallen in with some peculiarities
of his private position. Something, it is true, is to be allowed for the
infection of the time, which would touch a morally speculative mind such
as Hawthorne's to some degree; he would have observed these dreamers,
breaking out new paths in the hardened old world of custom and
inheritance, and would have followed the fortunes of the dream in its
effects on individual lives, for it would appeal to the moral
imagination and to his general sentiment about human life; but to become
one of the promoters would require, in a man so wary, so hard-headed and
cool as he naturally was in one half of his brain at least, a certain
pressure of fact upon him. No man was less of a reformer than Hawthorne;
he was constitutionally phlegmatic about society, a party man in
politics, and an ironical critic of all "come-outers," as these people
were then popularly named; and, in this instance, which is the only
apparently freakish action of his life, he was certainly swayed by what
he supposed to be his own interest. He was merely prospecting for a home
in which to settle. He was anxious to be married; he was thirty-seven
years old, and Sophia was thirty, and the engagement had already lasted
two years and more. In this new community hopes were held out that there
would be cottages for families, and the whole business of supporting a
family was to be simplified and made easier by the joint arrangements of
the community, in an economical sense; moreover, that blessed union of
manual toil with intellectual labor was a prime part of the enterprise,
and something akin to this Hawthorne still very much desired in his own
mind. To have some material work to do, to sustain a practical relation
with men and their general life, to have daily contact with matter of
fact as a means of escape from the old life of shadows, were still very
definite and prized ends with him. He was fairly possessed with this
idea for some years. It may fairly be believed that he had no ulterior
purpose or belief in the affair, but merely for his personal convenience
desired on the one hand to solve the old problem of living in the world
while not of it, and to provide a house for his wife to come to. He was
willing to try the new scheme, nothing else seeming so feasible at the
time to accomplish his immediate purpose; and he put into it all his
savings, one thousand dollars, but with the idea of withdrawing this
capital in case he was dissatisfied with the results, and should return
to the ordinary ways of the world.
Hawthorne arrived at the farm among the first of the new settlers, in an
April snowstorm, on the twelfth of the month, and began at once to make
the acquaintance of the barnyard. He was entirely destitute of
agricultural talents, original or acquired, a green hand in every sense
of the word, with that muscular willingness to learn which exhibits
itself by unusual destructive capacity upon implements of toil and the
docility of patient farm animals. He had physical strength, and after
attempting to chop, hay, and milk, he was given a dung-fork and set to
work at a pile of manure. He writes about these details with a softening
of the raw facts by elegancies of language, and much gentle fun, but
from the start he shows a playfulness of disposition in regard to the
whole affair, like a great boy on a vacation, as if the sense of it all
being, so far as he was concerned, a surprising joke on a novel scale
were in his mind and attitude all the time; and it is this humor,
interlacing on the page like sunshine, that makes the life of his
narrative. Occasionally there is the touch of true enjoyment out of
doors, as when, under the clear blue sky on the hillside, it seemed as
if he "were at work in the sky itself," and he notices the wild flowers
coming into the chill world; but, as before at the wharf, so now at his
farming, doubts assail his mind whether this manual labor is a
satisfactory solution of his difficulties in adjusting himself to the
world and opening communication with his fellow-men. The disillusion, if
there really had ever been any true hope on his part, was effected even
more quickly than before. Six weeks of manuring had brought him to
enthusiastic thankfulness that it was near done:--
"That abominable gold-mine! Thank God, we anticipate getting rid of its
treasures in the course of two or three days! Of all hateful places that
is the worst, and I shall never comfort myself for having spent so many
days of blessed sunshine there. It is my opinion that a man's soul may
be buried and perish under a dung-heap, or in a furrow of the field,
just as well as under a pile of money."
Ten weeks more finished the matter. "Joyful thought! in a little more
than a fortnight I shall be free from my bondage, ... free to enjoy
Nature,--free to think and feel!... Even my Custom House experience was
not such a thraldom and weariness; my mind and heart were free. Oh,
labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without
becoming proportionably brutified! Is it a praiseworthy matter that I
have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? It
is not so."
Shortly after this outburst he made a visit to his home at Salem, where
he had been much missed. The few letters that his sister Louisa wrote to
him after he first went to the farm afford the pleasantest, and almost
the only glimpse of his place in the family. His experiment was plainly
not welcome to them; his mother "groaned over it;" but, apart from that,
in which there may have been some family pride, though there was also
real personal solicitude, it is noticeable how his sister counts the
weeks he has been gone, and expresses their vehement desires for his
return, and shows the thoughtfulness of the family for him in many ways.
"Mother apostrophizes your picture because you do not come home," she
writes, after "nine weeks" of absence,--"a great deal too long." In that
secluded home he must indeed have been missed, and doubtless it seemed
to them day by day more certain that he had really gone out from them
into another world of his own. When he was in Salem in September,
however, he no sooner crossed the threshold than he felt the old
deserted life fall on him again like an evil spirit. "How immediately
and irrecoverably," he writes to Sophia, "should I relapse into the way
of life in which I spent my youth! If it were not for you, this present
world would see no more of me forever. The sunshine would never fall on
me, no more than on a ghost. Once in a while people might discern my
figure gliding stealthily through the dim evening,--that would be all. I
should be only a shadow of the night; it is you that give me reality,
and make all things real for me. If, in the interval since I quitted
this lonely old chamber, I had found no woman (and you were the only
possible one) to impart reality and significance to life, I should have
come back hither ere now, with a feeling that all was a dream and a
mockery."
Brook Farm seems to him now only another dream, and he gives his final
judgment on that matter:--
"Really I should judge it to be twenty years since I left Brook Farm;
and I take this to be one proof that my life there was an unnatural and
unsuitable, and therefore an unreal one. It already looks like a dream
behind me. The real Me was never an associate of the community; there
has been a spectral Appearance there, sounding the horn at daybreak, and
milking the cows, and hoeing potatoes, and raking hay, toiling in the
sun, and doing me the honor to assume my name. But this spectre was not
myself. Nevertheless, it is somewhat remarkable that my hands have,
during the past summer, grown very brown and rough, insomuch that many
people persist in believing that I, after all, was the aforesaid
spectral horn-sounder, cow-milker, potato-hoer, and hay-raker. But such
people do not know a reality from a shadow. Enough of nonsense."
Nevertheless he went back for a while, not now as a farmhand, but
apparently as a boarder, though he was made a trustee of the association
and chairman of the committee on finance. He took, from this time,
little part in the working life of the community. He had made up his
mind that there was to be no home for him there, though "weary, weary,
thrice weary of waiting so many ages." He turns his mind to other plans
of book-making, but does not have the seclusion he had found necessary
for composition, and rather mournfully writes that he "must observe, and
think, and feel, and content myself with catching glimpses of things
which may be wrought out hereafter." He did observe with his habitual
closeness the people who came and went, and the life of the inmates,
sitting himself apart a good deal with a book before his face. He made
friends with a few, a very few, of whom George Bradford and Frank Farley
remained to him in later times; but he was, as always, averse to
literary society, and came nearer to men of a different type in his
human intercourse. Sophia, who had seen him there amid the fraternity,
described his relationship to the others accurately, one of "courtesy
and conformableness and geniality;" but, she tells him, the expression
of his countenance was "that of a witness and hearer rather than of
comradeship." In the fall weather he spent much of his time rambling
about, and the scarlet color of the pastures, the warmth of the autumn
woods, and the fading of the blue-fringed gentian, last blossom of the
year, made up the texture of his notable life, just as similar things
had earlier done by the Salem shore. In the spring he left the
community, and made ready to go to Concord, where a place had been found
for him to settle.
In the production of literature, life at Brook Farm had proved as barren
as the years on Long Wharf. He had contributed one story, "A Virtuoso's
Collection," to "The Boston Miscellany" for May, 1842, and had added one
more to his little books, "Biographical Stories [Footnote:
_Biographical Stories for Children._ Benjamin West, Sir Isaac
Newton, Samuel Johnson, Oliver Cromwell, Benjamin Franklin, Queen
Christina. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Author of Historical Tales for Youth,
Twice-Told Tales, etc. Boston: Tappan and Dennet, 114 Washington St.
1842. 18mo. Pp. v, 161. "Historical Tales for Youth" was made up by
binding the three Grandfather's Chair books in the 18mo second edition,
1842, together with this volume, and issued as four volumes in two, so
labeled on the back.] for Children." The volume was added to the
"Grandfather's Chair" series, which was brought out in a new edition in
1842. To the same year belongs the enlarged edition of "Twice-Told
Tales," [Footnote: _Twice-Told Tales._ By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Boston: James Munroe and Company. 1842. 2 vols. 12mo. Pp. 331, 356. The
first volume contained the same tales as the former edition, with The
Toll-Gatherer's Day added. The second volume contained the following:
Howe's Masquerade, Edward Randolph's Portrait, Lady Eleanore's Mantle,
Old Esther Dudley, The Haunted Mind, The Village Uncle, The Ambitious
Guest, The Sister Years, Snowflakes, The Seven Vagabonds, The White Old
Maid, Peter Goldthwaite's Treasure, Chippings with a Chisel, The Shaker
Bridal, Night Sketches, Endicott and the Red Cross, The Lily's Quest,
Footprints on the Sea-Shore, Edward Fane's Rosebud, The Threefold
Destiny.] in two volumes, in which the number of stories was doubled,
but the collection still left out many titles which were afterwards
gathered.
Hawthorne had now been practically idle, so far as his genius was
concerned, for three years, and had experimented to his heart's content
in other modes of life. He had decided on immediate marriage. Sophia had
recovered from her invalidism, and the lifelong headache she had
experienced disappeared. It remained only to inform Madam Hawthorne of
the engagement which had been so long concealed. He felt some
trepidation, since, he says, "almost every agitating circumstance of her
life had cost her a fit of illness." But his fears were groundless; she
came out of her chamber to meet him as soon as he arrived, looking
better and more cheerful than usual, and full of kindness. "Foolish me,"
he writes happily to Sophia, "to doubt that my mother's love could be
wise, like all other genuine love!... It seems that our mother had seen
how things were a long time ago; at first her heart was troubled,
because she knew that much of outward as well as inward fitness was
requisite to secure our peace; but gradually and quietly God has taught
her that all is good, and so we shall have her fullest blessing and
concurrence. My sisters, too, begin to sympathize as they ought, and all
is well. God be praised! I thank Him on my knees, and pray Him to make
me worthy of the happiness you bring me." The quiet marriage took place
on July 9, 1842, at the home of the Peabodys in Boston, and Hawthorne
and his wife went to Concord to reside at the Old Manse.
IV.
THE OLD MANSE.
The life upon which the Hawthornes now entered for a period of three
years and more was one of village quiet and country happiness. Concord
was a characteristic town of eastern Massachusetts, with woodland,
pasture, and hill lying unevenly in a diversified landscape, and in the
midst the little river winding its slow way along by the famous bridge.
The neighbors were few, and for the most part were members of the
literary group of residents or visitors which gave Concord its later
distinction. Yet even here, amid this rural peace and in so restricted a
society, life at the Old Manse had a still deeper seclusion, as of a
place of retreat and inviolable privacy; there was an atmosphere of
solitude about it, wrapping it round, a sense of life with nature, and
only slight and distant contact with the world, the privacy of a house
that is snow-bound, lasting on as if by enchantment through July heats
as well as February drifts. Hawthorne enjoyed this freedom in the place
that first seemed to him like real home; and he and his wife pleased
their fancy with thinking of it as a native paradise, with themselves as
the new Adam and Eve, a thought which he had held in prospect before
marriage and now clung to with a curious tenacity, pursuing it through
many changes of idea; and, on the level of fact, he used to write that
he had never lived so like a boy since he really was a boy in the old
days in Maine.
The situation of the house lent itself to his tastes and inclinations.
It was set back from the street, toward which an avenue of trees led
out, and in the rear was the apple orchard with the river on its edge.
He could look from his windows on the life of the road, with its
occasional passers-by, for it was seldom that any one turned up the
avenue to call; and he could go down to the stream to bathe and fish in
summer, and to skate in winter on the black ice. He would wander out
over the fields and into the woods with Ellery Channing, and go boating
with Thoreau, both of whom were companions he liked to be with; or if he
met Margaret Fuller in the paths of Sleepy Hollow, he could spend an
hour or two in such half transcendental, half-sentimental talk as he
records from such a chance encounter. Emerson came, also, to talk and
walk with a man who was so firm-set in his own ways, being attracted to
him by the subtleties of personality, for he never could read
Hawthorne's tales then or afterwards, so profound was the opposition of
their genius. If visitors stayed at the manse, it would be George
Bradford, whom Hawthorne respected in the highest degree which his
appreciation of others ever reached, or Frank Farley, the half-crazy
Brook Farmer, whom he gave himself to in a more self-sacrificing way to
aid and comfort in his bewildered and imperfect state; or else Hillard
would arrive, with much cheerfulness and news from Longfellow or others
of the Cambridge men. But Hawthorne still kept the social world at a
distance from his private and intimate self; these men, though he
maintained kindly intercourse with them, never penetrated the shell of
his true reserve; the contact was but superficial; and though they were
good for company, he was often glad when they were gone and he was again
alone with nature and his dreams, and the ways and things of household
life.