CONCORD AND THE OLD MANSE: 1842-1845
The Ripley house dates back to the times of Captain Daniel Hathorne, or
even before him, and at Concord Fight the British left wing must have
extended close to it. Old and unpainted as it is, it gives a distinct
impression of refinement and good taste. Alone, I believe, among the
Concord houses of former times, it is set back far enough from the
country-road to have an avenue leading to it, lined with balm of Gilead
trees, and guarded at the entrance by two tall granite posts somewhat
like obelisks. On the further side of the house, Dr. Ripley had planted
an apple orchard, which included some rare varieties, especially the
blue pearmain, a dark-red autumn apple with a purple bloom upon it like
the bloom upon the rye. A high rounded hill on the northeast partially
shelters the house from the storms in that direction; and on the
opposite side the river sweeps by in a magnificent curve, with broad
meadows and rugged hills, leading up to the pale-blue outline of Mount
Wachusett on the western horizon. The Musketequid or Concord River has
not been praised too highly. Its clear, gently flowing current,
margined by bulrushes and grassy banks, produces an effect of mental
peacefulness, very different from the rushing turbulent waters and
rocky banks of Maine and New Hampshire rivers. From whatever point you
approach the Old Manse, it becomes the central object in a charming
country scene, and it does not require the peculiar effect of mouldering
walls to make it picturesque. It has stood there long, and may it long
remain.
There was formerly an Indian encampment on the same ground,--a
well-chosen position both strategically and for its southern
exposure. Old Mrs. Ripley had a large collection of stone arrow-heads,
corn-mortars, and other relics of the aborigines, which she used to show
to the young people who came to call on her grandchildren; and there
were among them pieces of a dark-bluish porphyry which she said was not
to be found in Massachusetts, but must have been brought from northern
New England. There was no reason why they should not have been. The
Indians could go from Concord in their canoes to the White Mountains
or the Maine lakes, and shoot the deer that came down to drink from the
banks of the river; but the deer disappeared before the advance of the
American farmer, and the Indians went with them. Now a grandson of Madam
Ripley, in the bronze likeness of a minuteman of 1775, stands sentinel
at “The Old North Bridge.”
Hawthorne ascended the hill opposite his house and wrote of the view
from it:
“The scenery of Concord, as I beheld it from the summit of the hill, has
no very marked characteristics, but has a great deal of quiet beauty, in
keeping with the river. There are broad and peaceful meadows, which,
I think, are among the most satisfying objects in natural scenery. The
heart reposes on them with a feeling that few things else can give,
because almost all other objects are abrupt and clearly defined; but a
meadow stretches out like a small infinity, yet with a secure homeliness
which we do not find either in an expanse of water or air.”
The great cranberry meadows below the north bridge are sometimes a
wonderful place in winter, when the river overflows its banks and they
become a broad sheet of ice extending for miles. There one can have a
little skating, an exercise of which Hawthorne was always fond.
It was now, and not at Brook Farm, that he found his true Arcadia, and
we have his wife’s testimony that for the first eighteen months or
more at the Old Manse, they were supremely happy. Every morning after
breakfast he donned the blue frock, which he had worn at West
Roxbury, and went to the woodshed to saw and split wood for the daily
consumption. After that he ascended to his study in the second story,
where he wrote and pondered until dinner-time. It appears also that he
sometimes assisted in washing the dishes--like a helpful mate. After
dinner he usually walked to the post-office and to a reading-room in the
centre of the town, where he looked over the Boston _Post_ for half an
hour. Later in the afternoon, he went rowing or fishing on the river,
but his wife does not seem to have accompanied him in these excursions,
for Judge Keyes, who often met him in his boat, does not mention seeing
her with him. In the evenings he read Shakespeare with Mrs. Hawthorne,
commencing with the first volume, and going straight through to the end,
“Titus Andronicus” and all,--and this must have occupied them a large
portion of the winter. How can a man fail to be happy in such a mode of
life!
Hawthorne also went swimming in the river when the weather
suited--rather exceptional in Concord for a middle-aged gentleman; but
there were two very attractive bathing places near the Old Manse, one,
a little above on the opposite side of the river, and the other,
afterwards known as Simmons’s Landing, where there was a row of tall
elms a short distance below the bridge. It is probable that Hawthorne
frequented the latter place, as being more remote from human
habitations. He did not take to his gun again, although he could see the
wild ducks in autumn, flying past his house. There were grouse and quail
in the woods, and woodcock were to be found along the brook which
ran through Emerson’s pasture; but perhaps Hawthorne had become too
tenderhearted for field-sports.
If Boston is the hub of the universe, Concord might be considered as the
linchpin which holds it on. Its population was originally derived
from Boston, and it must be admitted that it retains more Bostonian
peculiarities than most other New England towns. It does not assimilate
readily to the outside world. Nor is it surprising that few local
visitors called upon the Hawthornes at the Old Manse. Emerson, always
hospitable and public-spirited, went to call on them at once; and
John Keyes, also a liberal-minded man, introduced Hawthorne at the
reading-club. Margaret Fuller came and left a book for Hawthorne to
read, which may have annoyed him more than anything she could have said.
Elizabeth Hoar, a woman of exalted character, to whose judgment Emerson
sometimes applied for a criticism of his verses, also came sometimes;
but the Old Manse was nearly a mile away from Emerson’s house, and
also from what might be called the “court end” of the town. Hawthorne’s
nearest neighbor was a milk-farmer named George L. Prescott, afterward
Colonel of the Thirty-second Massachusetts Volunteers. He not only
brought them milk, but also occasionally a bouquet culled out of his
own fine nature, as a tribute to genius. A slightly educated man, he was
nevertheless one of Nature’s gentlemen, and his death in Grant’s advance
on Richmond was a universal cause of mourning at a time when so many
brave lives were lost.
Hawthorne, as usual, was on the lookout for ghosts, and there could not
have been a more suitable abode for those airy nothings, than the Old
Manse. Mysterious sounds were heard in it repeatedly, especially in the
nighttime, when the change of temperature produces a kind of settlement
in the affairs of old woodwork. Under date of August 8 he writes in his
diary:
“We have seen no apparitions as yet,--but we hear strange noises,
especially in the kitchen, and last night, while sitting in the parlor,
we heard a thumping and pounding as of somebody at work in my study.
Nay, if I mistake not (for I was half asleep), there was a sound as of
some person crumpling paper in his hand in our very bedchamber. This
must have been old Dr. Ripley with one of his sermons.”
Evidently he would have preferred seeing a ghost to receiving an
honorary degree from Bowdoin College, and if the shade of Doctor Ripley
had appeared to him in a dissolving light, like the Röntgen rays,
Hawthorne would certainly have welcomed him as a kindred spirit and have
expressed his pleasure at the manifestation.
Another idiosyncrasy of his, which seems like the idiom in a language,
was his total indifference to distinguished persons, simply as such.
It was not that he considered all men on a level, for no one recognized
more clearly the profound inequalities of human nature; but he was quite
as likely to take an interest in a store clerk as in a famous writer. It
is not necessary to suppose that a man is a parasite of fame because he
goes to a President’s reception, or wishes to meet a celebrated English
lecturer. It is natural that we should desire to know how such people
appear--their expression, their tone of voice, their general behavior;
but Hawthorne did not care for this. At the time of which we write,
Doctor Samuel G. Howe, the hero of Greek independence and the mental
liberator of Laura Bridgman, was a more famous man than Emerson or
Longfellow. He came to Concord with his brilliant wife, and they called
at the Old Manse, where Mrs. Hawthorne received them very cordially, but
they saw nothing of her husband, except a dark figure gliding through
the entry with his hat over his eyes. One can only explain this by
one of those fits of exceeding bashfulness that sometimes overtake
supersensitive natures. School-girls just budding into womanhood often
behave in a similar manner; and they are no more to be censured for
it than Hawthorne,--to whom it may have caused moments of poignant
self-reproach in his daily reflections. But Doctor Howe was the man
of all men whom Hawthorne ought to have known, and half an hour’s
conversation might have made them friends for life.
George William Curtis was a remarkably brilliant young man, and gave
even better promise for the future than he afterwards fulfilled,--as the
editor of a weekly newspaper. He was at Brook Farm with Hawthorne, and
afterward followed him to Concord, but is only referred to by Hawthorne
once, and then in the briefest manner. Neither has Hawthorne much to
say of Emerson; but Thoreau and Ellery Channing evidently attracted his
attention, for he refers to them repeatedly in his diary, and he
has left the one life-like portrait of Thoreau--better than a
photograph--that now exists. He surveys them both in rather a critical
manner, and takes note that Thoreau is the more substantial and original
of the two; and he is also rather sceptical as to Channing’s poetry,
which Emerson valued at a high rate; yet he narrowly missed making a
friend of Channing, with whom he afterward corresponded in a desultory
way.
We should not have known of Hawthorne’s skating at Concord, but for Mrs.
Hawthorne’s “Memoirs,” from which we learn that he frequently skated on
the overflowed meadows, where the Lowell railway station now stands.
She writes: “Wrapped in his cloak, he moved like a self-impelled Greek
statue, stately and grave.” This is the manner in which we should
imagine Hawthorne to have skated; but all others were a foil to her
husband in the eyes of his wife. [Footnote: “Memories of Hawthorne,”
52.] He was evidently a fine skater, gliding over the ice in long
sweeping curves. Emerson was also a dignified skater, but with a shorter
stroke, and stopping occasionally to take breath, or look about him,
as he did in his lectures. Thoreau came sometimes and performed rare
glacial exploits, interesting to watch, but rather in the line of the
professional acrobat. What a transfiguration of Hawthorne, to think of
him skating alone amid the reflections of a brilliant winter sunset!
When winter came Emerson arranged a course of evening receptions at
his house for the intellectual people of Concord, with apples and
gingerbread for refreshments. Curtis attended these, and has told us how
Hawthorne always sat apart with an expression on his face like a distant
thunder-cloud, saying little, and not only listening to but watching the
others. Curtis noticed a certain external and internal resemblance in
him to Webster, who was at times a thunderous-looking person--denoting,
I suppose, the electric concentration in his cranium. Emerson also
watched Hawthorne, and the whole company felt his silent presence, and
missed him greatly once or twice when he failed to come. Miss Elizabeth
Hoar said:
“The people about Emerson, Channing, Thoreau and the rest, echo his
manner so much that it is a relief to him to meet a man like Hawthorne,
on whom his own personality makes no impression.” Neither did Mrs.
Emerson echo her husband.
The greater a man is, intellectually, the more distinct his difference
from a general type and also from other men of genius. No two
personalities could be more unlike than Hawthorne and Emerson.
It would seem to be part of the irony of Fate that they should have
lived on the same street, and, have been obliged to meet and speak
with each other. One was like sunshine, the other shadow. Emerson was
transparent, and wished to be so; he had nothing to conceal from friend
or enemy. Hawthorne was simply impenetrable. Emerson was cordial and
moderately sympathetic. Hawthorne was reserved, but his sympathies were
as profound as the human soul itself. To study human nature as Hawthorne
and Shakespeare did, and to make models of their acquaintances for works
of fiction, Emerson would have considered a sin; while the evolution of
sin and its effect on character was the principal study of Hawthorne’s
life. One was an optimist, and the other what is sometimes unjustly
called a pessimist; that is, one who looks facts in the face and sees
people as they are.
[Footnote: “Sketches from Concord and Appledore.”]
While Emerson’s mind was essentially analytic, Hawthorne’s was
synthetic, and, as Conway says, he did not receive the world into his
intellect, but into his heart, or soul, where it was mirrored in a
magical completeness. The notion that the artist requires merely an
observing eye is a superficial delusion. Observation is worth little
without reflection, and everything depends on the manner in which
the observer deals with his facts. Emerson looked at life in order to
penetrate it; Hawthorne, in order to comprehend it, and assimilate it to
his own nature. The one talked heroism and the other lived it. Not but
that Emerson’s life was a stoical one, but Hawthorne’s was still more
so, and only his wife and children knew what a heart there was in him.
The world will never know what these two great men thought of one
another. Hawthorne has left some fragmentary sentences concerning
Emerson, such as, “that everlasting rejecter of all that is, and seeker
for he knows not what,” and “Emerson the mystic, stretching his hand out
of cloud-land in vain search for something real;” but he likes Emerson’s
ingenuous way of interrogating people, “as if every man had something to
give him.” However, he makes no attempt at a general estimate; although
this expression should also be remembered: “Clergymen, whose creed had
become like an iron band about their brows, came to Emerson to obtain
relief,”--a sincere recognition of his spiritual influence.
Several witnesses have testified that Emerson had no high opinion of
Hawthorne’s writing,--that he preferred Reade’s “Christie Johnstone” to
“The Scarlet Letter,” but Emerson never manifested much interest in art,
simply for its own sake. Like Bismarck, whom he also resembled in his
enormous self-confidence, he cared little for anything that had not a
practical value. He read Shakespeare and Goethe, not so much for the
poetry as for the “fine thoughts” he found in them. George Bradford
stated more than once that Emerson showed little interest in the
pictorial art; and after walking through the sculpture-gallery of the
Vatican, he remarked that the statues seemed to him like toys. His essay
on Michel Angelo is little more than a catalogue of great achievements;
he recognizes the moral impressiveness of the man, but not the value of
his sublime conceptions. Music, neither he nor Hawthorne cared for, for
it belongs to emotional natures.
In his “Society and Solitude” Emerson has drawn a picture of Hawthorne
as the lover of a hermitical life; a picture only representing that side
of his character, and developed after Emerson’s fashion to an artistic
extreme. “Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled
himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places
where he was not,” and “He had a remorse running to despair, of his
social _gaucheries_, and walked miles and miles to get the twitching out
of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his shoulders.”
[Footnote: “Society and Solitude,” 4, 5.]
There is a touch of arrogance in this, and it merely marks the
difference between the modest author of the “Essays,” and the proud,
censorious Emerson of 1870; but his love of absolute statements ofttimes
led him into strange contradictions, and the injustice which results
from judging our fellow-mortals by an inflexible standard was the final
outcome of his optimism. Hawthorne was more charitable when he remarked
that without Byron’s faults we should not have had his virtues; but the
truth lies between the two.
There have been many instances of genius as sensitive as Hawthorne’s
in various branches of art: Shelley and Southey, Schubert and Chopin,
Correggio and Corot. Southey not only blushed red but blushed blue--as
if the life were going out of him; and in Chopin and Correggio at
least we feel that they could not have been what they were without it.
Napoleon, whose nerves were like steel wires, suffered nevertheless from
a peculiar kind of physical sensitiveness. He could not take medicines
like other men,--a small dose had a terrible effect on him,--and it was
much the same with respect to changes of food, climate, and the like.
What Hawthorne required was sympathetic company. Do not we all require
it? The hypercritical morality of the Emersonians, especially in
Concord, could not have been favorable to his mental ease and comfort.
How could a man in a happily married condition feel anything but
repugnance to Thoreau’s idea of marriage as a necessary evil; or
Alcott’s theory that eating animal food tended directly to the
commission of crime?
On the first anniversary of Hawthorne’s wedding, a tragical drama was
enacted in Concord, in which he was called upon to perform a subordinate
part. One Miss Hunt, a school-teacher and the daughter of a Concord
farmer, drowned herself in the river nearly opposite the place where
Hawthorne was accustomed to bathe. The cause of her suicide has never
been adequately explained, but as she was a transcendentalist, or
considered herself so, there were those who believed that in some
occult way that was the occasion of it. However, as one of her sisters
afterward followed her example, it would seem more likely to have come
from the development of some family trait. She was seen walking upon
the bank for a long time, before she took the final plunge; but the
catastrophe was not discovered until near evening.
Ellery Channing came with a man named Buttrick to borrow Hawthorne’s
boat for the search, and Hawthorne went with them. As it happened, they
were the ones who found the corpse, and Hawthorne’s account in his diary
of its recovery is a terribly accurate description,--softened down and
poetized in the rewritten statement of “The Blithedale Romance.”
There is in fact no description of a death in Homer or Shakespeare so
appalling as this literal transcript of the veritable fact.
[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 300.]
What concerns us here, however, are the comments he set down on the
dolorous event. Concerning her appearance, he says:
“If she could have foreseen while she stood, at five o’clock that
morning on the bank of the river, how her maiden corpse would have
looked eighteen hours afterwards, and how coarse men would strive with
hand and foot to reduce it to a decent aspect, and all in vain,--it
would surely have saved her from the deed.”
And again:
“I suppose one friend would have saved her; but she died for want of
sympathy--a severe penalty for having cultivated and refined herself out
of the sphere of her natural connections.”
The first remark has often been misunderstood. It is not the vanity
of women, which is after all only a reflection (or the reflective
consequence) of the admiration of man, which Hawthorne intends, but
that delicacy of feeling which Nature requires of woman for her own
protection; and he may not have been far wrong in supposing that if Miss
Hunt had foreseen the exact consequences of her fatal act she would not
have committed it. Hawthorne’s remark that her death was a consequence
of having refined and cultivated herself beyond the reach of her
relatives, seems a rather hard judgment. The latter often happens in
American life, and although it commonly results in more or less family
discord, are we to condemn it for that reason? If she died as Hawthorne
imagines, from the lack of intellectual sympathy, we may well inquire if
there was no one in Concord who might have given aid and encouragement
to this young aspiring soul.
“Take her up tenderly;
Lift her with care,
Fashioned so slenderly,
Young and so fair.”
And one is also tempted to add:
“Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity.”
Hawthorne’s earthly paradise only endured until the autumn of 1843. When
cool weather arrived, want and care came also. On November 26 he wrote
to George S. Hillard:
“I wish at some leisure moment you would give yourself the trouble
to call into Munroe’s book-store and inquire about the state of my
‘Twice-told Tales.’ At the last accounts (now about a year since) the
sales had not been enough to pay expenses; but it may be otherwise
now--else I shall be forced to consider myself a writer for posterity;
or at all events not for the present generation. Surely the book was
puffed enough to meet with a sale.”
[Footnote: London Athenæum, August 10, 1889.]
The interpretation of this is that Longfellow, Hillard and Bridge could
appreciate Hawthorne’s art, but the solid men of Boston (with some
rare exceptions) could not. Even Webster preferred the grotesque art of
Dickens to Hawthorne’s “wells of English undefiled.” Recently, one of
the few surviving original copies of “Fanshawe” was sold at auction
for six hundred dollars. Such is the difference between genius and
celebrity.
The trouble then and now is that wealthy Americans as a class feel
no genuine interest in art or literature. They do not form a true
aristocracy, but a plutocracy, and are for the most part very poorly
educated. It was formerly the brag of the Winthrops and Otises that they
could go through college and learn their lessons in the recitation-room.
Now they go to row, and play foot-ball, and after they graduate, they
leave the best portion of their lives behind them. Then if they have a
talent for business they become absorbed in commercial affairs; or if
not, they travel from one country to another, picking up a smattering
of everything, but not resting long enough in any one place for their
impressions to develop and bear good fruit. They are not like the
aristocratic classes of England, France and Germany, who become
cultivated men and women, and serve to maintain a high standard of art
and literature in those countries.
The captain of a Cunard steamship, who owned quite a library, said in
1869: “I have bought some very interesting books in New York, especially
by a writer named Hawthorne, but the type and paper are so poor that
they are not worth binding.” The reason why American publishers do not
bring out books in such good form as foreign publishers--is that there
is no demand for a first-rate article. Thus do the fine arts languish.
When rich young Americans take as much interest in painting and
sculpture as they do in foot-ball and yachting, we shall have our
Vandycks and Murillos,--if nothing better.
Discouraged with the ill success of “Fanshawe,” Hawthorne had limited
himself since then to the writing of short sketches, such as would be
acceptable to the magazine editors, and now that he had formed this
habit, he found it difficult to escape from it. He informs us in the
preface to “Mosses from an Old Manse” that he had hoped a more serious
and extended plot would come to him on the banks of Concord River, but
his imagination did not prove equal to the occasion. Most of the stories
in “Mosses” must have been composed at Concord, but “Mrs. Bull-Frog’”
and “Monsieur du Miroir” must have been written previously, for he
refers to them in a letter at Brook Farm. A few were published in
the _Democratic Review_, and others may have been elsewhere; but the
proceeds he derived from them would not have supported a day-laborer,
and toward the close of his second year at the Manse, Hawthorne found
himself running in debt for the necessaries of life. He endured this
with his usual stoical reticence, although there is nothing like debt to
sicken a man’s heart,--unless he be a decidedly light-minded man. Better
fortune, however, was on its way to him in the shape of a political
revolution.
On March 3, 1844, a daughter was born to the Hawthornes, whom they named
Una, in spite of Hillard’s objection that the name was too poetic or too
fanciful for the prosaic practicalities of real life. The name was an
excellent one for a poet’s daughter, and did not seem out of place in
Arcadian Concord. Miss Una grew up into a graceful, fair and poetic
young lady,--in all respects worthy of her name. She had an uncommonly
fine figure, and, as often happens with first-born children, resembled
her father much more than her mother. Her name also suggests the early
influence of Spenser in her father’s style and mode of thought.
Soon after this fortunate event Hawthorne wrote a letter to Hillard, in
which he said:
“I find it a very sober and serious kind of happiness that springs from
the birth of a child. It ought not come too early in a man’s life--not
till he has fully enjoyed his youth--for methinks the spirit can never
be thoroughly gay and careless again, after this great event. We gain
infinitely by the exchange; but we do give up something nevertheless.
As for myself who have been a trifler preposterously long, I find it
necessary to come out of my cloud-region, and allow myself to be woven
into the sombre texture of humanity.”
It seems then that his conscience sometimes reproached him, but this
only proves that his moral nature was in a healthy normal condition.
There was a certain kind of indolence in him, a love of the _dolce far
niente_, and an inclination to general inactivity which he may have
inherited from his seafaring ancestors. Much better so, than to suffer
from the nervous restlessness, which is the rule rather than the
exception in New England life.
In the same letter he mentions having forwarded a story to _Graham’s
Magazine_, which was accepted but not yet published after many months.
He also anticipates an amelioration of his affairs from a Democratic
victory in the fall elections.
Meanwhile, Horatio Bridge had been traversing the high seas in the
“Cyane,” which was finally detailed to watch for slavers and to protect
American commerce on the African coast. He had kept a journal of his
various experiences and observations, which he sent to Hawthorne with
a rather diffident interrogation as to whether it might be worth
publishing. Hawthorne was decidedly of the opinion that it ought to be
published,--in which we cordially agree with him,--and was well pleased
to edit it for his friend; and, although it has now shared the fate of
most of the books of its class, it is excellent reading for those who
chance to find a copy of it. Bridge was a good observer, and a candid
writer.
The election of 1844 was the most momentous that had yet taken place
in American history. It decided the annexation of Texas, and the
acquisition of California, with a coast-line on the Pacific Ocean nearly
equal to that on the Atlantic; but it also brought with it an unjust
war of greed and spoliation, and other evil consequences of which we are
only now begining to reach the end. The slaveholders and the Democratic
leaders desired Texas in order to perpetuate their control of the
government, and it was precisely through this measure that they lost
it,--as happens so often in human affairs. It was the gold discoveries
in California that upset their calculations. California would _not_ come
into the Union as a slave state. Enraged at this failure, the Southern
politicians made a desperate attempt to recover lost ground, by seizing
on the fertile prairies in the Northwest; but there they came into
conflict with the industrial classes of the North, who fought them on
their own ground and abolished slavery. Never had public injustice been
followed by so swift and terrible a retribution.
In regard to the candidates of 1844, it was hardly possible to
compare them. Polk possessed the ability to preside over the House of
Representatives, but he did not rise above this; while Clay could be
fairly compared on some points with Washington himself, and united with
this a persuasive eloquence second only to Webster’s. He was practically
defeated by fifteen or twenty thousand abolitionists who preferred to
throw away their votes rather than to cast them for a slave-holder.
Hawthorne, in the quiet seclusion of his country home, did not realize
this danger to the Republic. He only knew that his friends were
victorious, and was happy in the expectation of escaping from his debts,
and of providing more favorably for his little family.