shrine. The beautiful carpet lays the foundation of its charms, and the
oak woodwork harmonizes with the tint in which Endymion is painted. At
last I have Endymion where I always wanted it--in my husband's study,
and it occupies one whole division of the wall. In the corner on that
side stands the pedestal with Apollo on it, and there is a
fountain-shaped vase of damask and yellow roses. Between the windows is
the Transfiguration [given by Mr. Emerson]. (The drawing-room is to be
redeemed with one picture only,--Correggio's Madonna and Christ.) On
another side of the Study are the two Lake Comos. On another, that
agreeable picture of Luther and his family around the Christmas-tree,
which Mr. George Bradford gave to Mr. Hawthorne. Mr. Emerson took Julian
to walk in the woods, the other afternoon. I have no time to think what
to say, for there is a dear little mob around me. Baby looks fairest of
fair to-day. She walks miles about the house."
No words but her own do justice to the happiness of her married life.
She worshiped her husband, who always remained to her that combination
of adorable genius and tender lover and strong man that he had been ten
years before when they were wedded. He had been on his part as devoted
to her, and especially he had never allowed the burden of poverty to
fall upon her in any physical hardship. In the absence of servants, for
example, he himself did the work, and would not permit her to task
herself with it. He was never a self-indulgent man, except toward his
genius; he had early learned the lesson of "doing without," as the
phrase is, and she describes him as being "as severe as a Stoic about
all personal comforts" and says he "never in his life allowed himself a
luxury." Her testimony to his household character is a remarkable
tribute, nor does it detract from it to remember that it is an encomium
of love:--
"He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to do
the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any
more than it is to a baby to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act, and
a baby is not more unconscious in its innocence. I never knew such
loftiness, so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in
the most trivial household matter, any more than in a larger or more
public one. If the Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere, their
wings are very strong. But I have never thought of him as in time, and
so the Hours have nothing to do with him. Happy, happiest is the wife
who can bear such and so sincere testimony to her husband after eight
years' intimate union. Such a person can never lose the prestige which
commands and fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness,
but, in a blissful kind of confusion, live on. If I can only be so
great, so high, so noble, so sweet, as he in any phase of my being, I
shall be glad."
This was written in the Berkshire days, but it represents her habitual
feeling at all times; and now, in the pleasant society of Concord and
among the scenes which were endeared to their memory as those of their
early married life, this strain of happiness often overflows in her
letters like a flood of sunshine. "All that ground," she writes of the
neighborhood of the Old Manse, "is consecrated to me by unspeakable
happiness; yet not nearly so great happiness as I now have, for I am ten
years happier in time, and an uncounted degree happier in kind. I know
my husband ten years better, and I have not arrived at the end; for he
is still an enchanting mystery, beyond the region I have discovered and
made my own. Also, I know partly how happy I am, which I did not well
comprehend ten years ago."
One scene, out of scores that are contained in her correspondence, is
too pretty and characteristic to miss, and, besides, serves by a single
glimpse to give the home life of this new Concord sojourn with great
vividness, yielding--what is the hardest of all to obtain in such
intimate views--its quality, like a tone of color. It describes
Hawthorne's return from a three weeks' absence at the Isles of Shoals
during which he had also attended his class reunion at Bowdoin:--
"I put the vase of delicious rosebuds, and a beautiful China plate of
peaches and grapes, and a basket of splendid golden Porter apples on his
table; and we opened the western door and let in a flood of sunsetting.
Apollo's 'beautiful disdain' seemed kindled anew. Endymion smiled richly
in his dream of Diana. Lake Como was wrapped in golden mist. The divine
form in the Transfiguration floated in light. I thought it would be a
pity if Mr. Hawthorne did not come that moment. As I thought this, I
heard the railroad-coach--and he was here. He looked, to be sure, as he
wrote in one of his letters, 'twice the man he was.'"
Earlier in the summer this happy home had been shadowed by the tragedy
of the death of Hawthorne's sister, Louisa, who was lost in a steamship
disaster on the Hudson. Like all such natures, Hawthorne took his griefs
hard and in loneliness; but in such a home healing influences were all
about him, and even such a sorrow, which he deeply felt, could only add
another silence to his life. His summer work, to which he had turned
with reluctance and had rapidly finished by the end of August, was the
campaign biography of Franklin Pierce, his life-long friend, who was now
a candidate for the Presidency. It is a brief but sufficient book,
[Footnote: _Life of Franklin Pierce_. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1852. Pp. 144. 12mo.] done well though
without distinction, and it holds no real place among his works. Much
adverse criticism has, however, been made upon him for writing it at
all. It is thought that as a man of letters he lost dignity by using his
skill for a political end, and also that as a Northerner he placed
himself upon the wrong side in the important public questions then
coming to a great national crisis. This is an unjust view. It has
already become plain, in the course of the story of his life, that he
was not a reformer nor in any real sympathy with reform. He was not only
not an abolitionist, which in itself, in view of the closeness of his
association with the friends of the cause, argues great immobility in
his character; he was, on the contrary, a Democrat in national politics,
and took the party view of the slavery question, not with any energy,
but placidly and stolidly, so far as one can judge. In fact he took
little or no interest in the matter. There was no objection in his mind
to writing the biography because of Pierce's political position; he did
not hesitate on that score. He did not hang back, on the other hand,
because he felt that he could not tell the truth about his friend in a
book pledged to see only the good in him. He was as honest as the
granite, so far as that is concerned; and he respected as well as loved
his friend, and was quite willing to serve him by showing his life and
character as he knew them. He had no intention to deceive any one by a
eulogy. He indulged in no illusions about Pierce, nor about any of his
other friends. He was, in fact, an unsparing critic of men's characters,
and he had a trait, not rare in New England,--a willingness to underrate
men and minimize them. His fellow-citizens are not natural
hero-worshipers; to them "a man is a man, for a' that," with an accent
that levels down as well as up. Hawthorne had to the full this
democratic, familiar, derogatory temper. Pierce was to him a politician,
just as Cilley had been, and for politicians as a class he had a
well-defined contempt. He believed Pierce to be a man of honor,
sagacity, and tact, a true man, not great in any way, but quite the
equal of other men in the country and fit in ability, experience, and
character to be President, if his fellow-citizens desired him to serve
in that office. The biography Hawthorne wrote contains no conscious
untruth. It cannot be thought that Hawthorne compromised with himself
either with regard to the national question involved or to the personal
character of the candidate. His reluctance to write the book had no
deeper root than a dislike to seem to be paid for doing it by an office.
He knew that Pierce would provide him with a lucrative post in any case;
and the public would say that office was his pay. The prospect of this
situation was so irksome to him that he decided beforehand to refuse the
office, since he preferred rather to do that than to decline the request
of his friend to oblige him with his literary service at such a crisis
of his career. It is unjust to Hawthorne to suppose that the act had any
political complexion, or was anything else than a mere piece of
friendliness, natural and proper in itself; his association with the
political group, of which Pierce was one, did not proceed from
principle, but was an accident of college companionship; the fact is,
however strange it may seem, he had no politics, but stood apart from
the great antislavery cause just as he did from the transcendental
philosophy; neither of these two main movements in the life of his times
touched him at all in a personal way. It belongs to the shallowness of
his objection to undertake the biography, his dislike to take office as
a kind of pay, that it was easily removed. Fields very sensibly
persuaded him that he should not neglect so favorable an opportunity to
provide for his wife and children, who had no support but his life. When
the newly elected President, therefore, offered him the best office in
his gift, the Liverpool consulate, Hawthorne decided to take it. The
nomination was confirmed March 26, 1853; and, after sending "Tanglewood
Tales" to the press, which had been his winter's work, he prepared to
leave Concord for a long residence abroad.
VII.
LIFE ABROAD.
Hawthorne left the Wayside home with a good deal of regret for its quiet
happiness, and yet with pleasant anticipations of the opportunity of
seeing foreign countries. He had the roaming instinct; and, though he
had almost completed fifty years of life, its satisfaction had been of
the slightest. It is necessary to recall how very little he had seen of
the world in order to appreciate at all the way in which England and
Italy looked to his middle-aged eyes, the points in which they failed to
appeal to him as well as those in which they arrested his interest. With
all his love, or at least sentiment, for the sea, this was the first
voyage he had made, and finding himself a good sailor he enjoyed it
immensely. It was the next thing to commanding a ship himself upon his
ancestral element, and he felt the mystery and distance and that vague
impression of indefinite time that belong to the ocean atmosphere,--the
wish to sail on and on forever. In Liverpool, where he arrived in July,
he was plunged at once into a confused mass of new impressions and also
into the very mundane duties and surroundings of the consulate.
The narrative of his European experiences in every aspect is fully told
in the book of reminiscences "Our Old Home," which he published after
his return, and in the voluminous note-books kept in his English,
French, and Italian sojourns; and this long story is still further
enlarged and varied by the letters of the family, and the recollections
of his friends. It can be read in detail, and except as a story of
detail it has very little interest. The essential point which belongs to
his biography is to see how Hawthorne bore himself, the general
impression made on him, the ways in which his character came out, in
these novel circumstances. At first, he found the office itself very
much an old story. In fact, as a matter of routine and a part of daily
external affairs, the life of the consulate was that of the Boston coal
wharf and the Salem Custom House over again. He repeated the history of
these early experiences to the letter, except that he was no longer
ridden with the idea that he must go to work in a material, every-day
task in order to be a man among men; he was free from that delusion, but
at the same time he welcomed the change of life. Politics had already
begun to take on that unpleasantness for a Northern man of his
affiliations which could make even so dull a participant as he was, in
his sluggish conservatism, very uncomfortable; he had felt its rude
censures and misapprehensions of delicate personal relations--such as
existed between himself and President Pierce--disagreeably near at
hand; and he was glad to get away from his native land, upon which
before a year had passed he looked back with the feeling that he never
desired to return to it. He did not enjoy England so much, however, as
this might seem to indicate; and, especially, he did not enjoy his work,
for, notwithstanding his philosophy of the usefulness of manual toil and
regular occupation of an unliterary kind, the touch of work always
disenchanted his mind at once. He liked it no better than on the two
previous occasions at Boston and Salem; it bored and wearied him, and
just as before, though he does not now complain of the fact, it put an
end to his literary activity, paralyzed and sterilized his genius as
completely as if it had blasted him with a curse. The difficulty of
serving two masters, though it is sometimes thought to be a service
peculiarly fitted for men of letters, was illustrated in Hawthorne's
career in many ways and on several occasions, but nowhere more plainly
than in the period of his five years of atrophy from the time he entered
the consulate till the composition of "The Marble Faun." He wrote
vigorously in his note-books, from time to time, but such composition
was the opiate it had always been for his higher imaginative and moral
powers, and exercised only his faculty of observation. The fact that he
does not complain of this state of affairs is due probably to his
growing weariness of higher literary effort, the true power of his
genius, which now had only an ebbing physical force for its basis. He
was too much engaged in affairs, and too tired, to write; but he was not
displeased to have so good an excuse, and perhaps his ambition was
already really satisfied by the success he had achieved, and he felt the
spur less.
Altogether, the first and lasting impression made by his account of his
life at Liverpool is that he was the same discontented employee who had
chafed against circumstances before, and had not changed his mind with
the skies over him. The expression of his moods has the old touch of
irritability, too, in its excess of language, its air of confiding
something that one would not say aloud, its half-conscious pettishness.
In March, 1854, he writes to Bridge, in this character, though here
possibly it is the presence of politics that is the disturbing factor:--
"I like my office well enough, but any official duties and obligations
are irksome to me beyond expression. Nevertheless, the emoluments will
be a sufficient inducement to keep me here, though they are not above a
quarter part what some people suppose them.
"It sickens me to look back to America. I am sick to death of the
continual fuss and tumult and excitement and bad blood which we keep up
about political topics. If it were not for my children I should probably
never return, but--after quitting office--should go to Italy, and live
and die there. If Mrs. Bridge and you would go, too, we might form a
little colony amongst ourselves, and see our children grow up together.
But it will never do to deprive them of their native land, which I hope
will be a more comfortable and happy residence in their day than it has
been in ours. In my opinion, we are the most miserable people on earth.
"I wish you would send me the most minute particulars about Pierce--how
he looks and behaves when you meet him, how his health and spirits
are--and above all, what the public really thinks of him--a point which
I am utterly unable to get at through the newspapers. Give him my best
regards, and ask him whether he finds his post any more comfortable than
I prophesied it would be."
Another year's experience completed his dissatisfaction, and it had
reached the familiar acute stage, as early as July, 1855, when he
indited that well-known note to Mr. Bright, "the tall, slender,
good-humored, laughing, voluble" English friend, who had done everything
in the world to make him happy:--
Dear Mr. Bright,--I have come back (only for a day or two) to this black
and miserable hole.
Truly yours, Nath. Hawthorne.
There spoke the man, as if the sun had photographed him. It is true that
he had a particular occasion for black spirits at the moment, inasmuch
as the law reducing the emoluments of the office had just gone into
effect, in consequence of which the wages of his slavery were much
reduced. He was now very much disposed to resign. He had saved enough
money to free his mind from any anxiety for the future, since he thought
he could live on what he had with the exercise of economy; the health of
Mrs. Hawthorne was somewhat impaired, and it was necessary to arrange a
change of residence for her; and he was thoroughly weary of his English
surroundings. The President offered him a post in the American Legation
at Lisbon, but he declined to consider it; and finally the matter was
settled by Mrs. Hawthorne spending the winter at Lisbon with O'Sullivan,
who was minister there, while Hawthorne himself retained the consulate
and remained in Liverpool, keeping Julian with him while the other two
children accompanied their mother. Mrs. Hawthorne, after a delightful
visit, returned much improved in health, and it was not until the autumn
of 1857 that Hawthorne retired from office, after Buchanan became
President.
As a consul Hawthorne discharged his duties with fidelity and
efficiency, and was in every way a satisfactory officer. He was diligent
and attentive in business affairs, and he was especially considerate of
the numbers of distressed citizens who naturally drifted into his care
and notice, and was always conscientious and generous in dealing with
them, while the burden was a heavy charge. The only matter that stands
out notably in his official action is his interest in the inhumane
treatment of sailors on American ships, and just before he left office
he sent a long dispatch to his government in respect to it. His
reflections on the subject, which are apposite and sensible enough, are
of less interest biographically than a few sentences upon himself in
this philanthropic character, which he wrote to his sister-in-law:--
"I do not know what Sophia may have said about my conduct in the
Consulate. I only know that I have done no good,--none whatever.
Vengeance and beneficence are things that God claims for Himself. His
instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they
have, it is a pretty sure token that they are _not_ His
instruments. The good of others, like our own happiness, is not to be
attained by direct effort, but incidentally. All history and observation
confirm this. I am really too humble to think of doing good! Now, I
presume you think the abolition of flogging was a vast boon to seamen. I
see, on the contrary, with perfect distinctness, that many murders and
an immense mass of unpunishable cruelty--a thousand blows, at least, for
every one that the cat-of-nine-tails would have inflicted--have resulted
from that very thing. There is a moral in this fact which I leave you to
deduce. God's ways are in nothing more mysterious than in this matter of
trying to do good."
This is the same voice that was heard in "The House of the Seven Gables"
and "The Blithedale Romance," and shows how deep-seated was Hawthorne's
antipathy to conscious philanthropy, and doubtless he meant Elizabeth
Peabody as she read it to lay it to heart as an abolitionist.
If Hawthorne observed much cruelty among the crews of American ships, he
must have accepted it as a part of the general misery of the world with
as much philosophy as he was master of, while he did his duty with
regard to it according to his opportunities. He was well liked by the
sea captains who came in contact with him. He had, indeed, a good
previous training, inasmuch as his terms of service in the Custom House
had made him familiarly acquainted with this seafaring type, to which he
was also akin. He met the American captains not only at his office, but
at the boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, where they resorted in numbers,
and where he himself lived at various times, and during the whole period
of his wife's absence in Portugal. This house is described by himself as
strongly impregnated with tar and bilge-water, and the men as very much
alive. He admired them, and thought they contrasted very favorably with
Englishmen in vitality, and he liked to be with them. Just as he had
associated happily and on equal terms with similar men whom he had known
in his own country, and made good-fellowship with them at Salem, he now
was a welcome and companionable member of this hardy group, which his
son Julian remembered in its general look and quality, and describes in
a smoking-room scene that makes this side of Hawthorne more lifelike
than it appears elsewhere:--
"The smoking-room was an apartment barely twenty feet square, though of
a fair height; but the captains smoked a great deal, and by nine o'clock
sat enveloped in a blue cloud. They played euchre with a jovial
persistence that seems wonderful in the retrospect, especially as there
was no gambling. The small boys in the house (there were two or three)
soon succeeded in mastering the mysteries of the game, and occasionally
took a hand with the captains. Hawthorne was always ready to play, and
used to laugh a great deal at the turns of fortune. He rather enjoyed
card-playing, and was a very good hand at whist; and knew, besides, a
number of other games, many of which are now out of fashion, but which
he, I suppose, had learned in his college days. Be the diversion or the
conversation what it might, he was never lacking in geniality and
good-fellowship; and sparkles of wit and good humor continually came
brightening out of his mouth, making the stalwart captains haw-haw
prodigiously, and wonder, perhaps, where his romances came from.
Nevertheless, in his official capacity, he sometimes made things (in
their own phrase) rather lively for them; and it is a tribute to his
unfailing good sense and justice, that his enforcement of the law never
made him unpopular."
Christmas Day was an occasion of special festivity at this
boarding-house, and that of 1855 was unusually distinguished in its
annals by the presence of Hawthorne and the legend of the merry-making
about him which his friend Bright put into his clever rhymes of the
"Song of Consul Hawthorne." Whether in his office, or at the
boarding-house, or going about the docks at Liverpool, "Consul
Hawthorne" was evidently a very typical New Englander abroad, and
popular with his own people. He had laid the author off, and was as
purely a practical man of nautical affairs as would be found in any
shipping office in the city; and it needed no close observer to see that
the native element in him was of a very obstinate and unmalleable
nature.
It has been suggested that Hawthorne was afraid of liking English people
better than an American ought, as he says he suspects Grace Greenwood
did:--
"She speaks rapturously of the English hospitality and warmth of heart.
I likewise have already experienced something of this, and apparently
have a good deal more of it at my option. I wonder how far it is
genuine, and in what degree it is better than the superficial good
feeling with which Yankees receive foreigners,--a feeling not calculated
for endurance, but a good deal like a brushwood fire. We shall see!"