plays such a prominent part in the early history of American
literature, descended upon the quiet Salem household like the
"godmother in a fairy story." Fields has told the story of his visit:
"I found him alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling;
and as the day was cold, he was hovering near a stove. We fell into
talk about his future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find
him, in a very desponding mood. 'Now,' said I, 'is the time for you to
publish, for I know during these years in Salem you must have got
something ready for the press.' 'Nonsense,' said he, 'what heart had I
to write anything, when my publishers have been so many years trying
to sell a small edition of the _Twice-told Tales_.' I still pressed
upon him the good chances he would have now with something new. 'Who
would risk publishing a book for me, the most unpopular writer in
America?' 'I would,' said I, 'and would start with an edition of 2,000
copies of anything you would write.' 'What madness!' he exclaimed.
'Your friendship for me gets the better of your judgment.' 'No, no!'
he continued, 'I have no money to indemnify a publisher's losses on my
account.' I looked at my watch, and found that the train would be soon
starting for Boston, and I knew that there was not much time to lose
in trying to discover what had been his literary work during these
last few years in Salem. I remember that I pressed him to reveal to me
what he had been writing. He shook his head and gave me to understand
that he had produced nothing. At that moment I caught sight of a
bureau or set of drawers near where we were sitting; and immediately
it occurred to me that hidden in that article of furniture was a story
or stories by the author of _Twice-told Tales_; and I became so
positive of it that I charged him vehemently with the fact. He seemed
surprised, I thought, but shook his head again; and I rose to take my
leave, begging him not to come into the cold entry, saying I would
come back and see him again in a few days. I was hurrying down the
stairs when he called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a
moment. Then quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of MS. in his
hands, he said: 'How in heaven's name did you know this thing was
there? As you found me out, take what was written, and tell me, after
you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It
is either very good or very bad--I don't know which!' On my way to
Boston I read the germ of _The Scarlet Letter_."
Hawthorne's original plan was to write a number of stories, of which
this particular one was to be the longest. He was going to call his
book of tales, _Old-Time Legends: together with Sketches, Experimental
and Ideal_,--a title which Woodberry calls "ghostly with the
transcendental nonage of his genius." Fields urged that the tale be
made longer and fuller and that it be published by itself. So the
original plan was changed, as was also the title. This was wise, for
the cumbersome original title would have killed any book, but the
present title is nothing short of a stroke of genius.
About this time Hawthorne's friends, under the leading of Hillard,
sent a kind letter and a considerable sum of money. Hawthorne
replied,--"I read your letter in the vestibule of the Post Office; and
it drew--what my troubles never have--the water to my eyes; so that I
was glad of the sharply-cold west wind that blew into them as I came
homeward, and gave them an excuse for being red and bleared." After
saying it was sweet to be remembered, but bitter to need their aid, he
concludes,--"The money, dear Hillard, will smooth my path for a long
time to come. The only way in which a man can retain his self-respect,
while availing himself of the generosity of his friends, is by making
it an incitement to his utmost exertion, so that he may not need their
help again. I shall look upon it so--nor will shun any drudgery that
my hand shall find to do, if thereby I may win bread."
Four days after this letter was written, on February 3, 1850, he
finished _The Scarlet Letter_. He writes to a friend saying he read
the last scene to his wife, or rather tried to read it, "for my voice
swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it
subsides after a storm." Mrs. Hawthorne told a friend that her husband
seemed depressed all during that winter. "There was a knot in his
forehead all the time," said his wife. One day he told her he had a
story that he wished to read to her. He read part of the work one
evening. The next evening he continued. His wife followed the story
with intense interest. Her excitement arose until when he was reading
near the end of the book, where Arthur and Hester and the child meet
in the forest, Mrs. Hawthorne sank from her low stool to the floor and
said she could endure no more. Hawthorne stopped and said in
wonder,--"Do you really feel it so much? Then there must be something
in it."
Mrs. Hawthorne relates that on the day after the MS. was delivered to
Fields, this publisher returned and when admitted to the house caught
up her boy in his arms and said,--"You splendid little fellow, do you
know what a father you have?" Then he ran upstairs to talk to
Hawthorne, calling to her as he went that he had sat up all night to
read the story. Soon her husband came down and walked about the room
with a new light in his eyes.
Early in April the book was issued in an edition of 5,000 copies; this
was soon exhausted, and Hawthorne was well started on that career of
literary fame which led Mr. Hamilton W. Mabie, a hundred years after
the birth of Hawthorne, to call him "the foremost literary artist of
America."
_The Scarlet Letter_, as Hawthorne himself tells us, is a story of
"human frailty and sorrow." It is the story of one who has brooded
long and faithfully upon the problem of evil. In it we read that man
is the master of his fate. The great difference between ancient and
modern literature is this: the old dramatists seem to believe that
somewhere there is a power above and beyond the control of man, a
blind, unreasoning force that seems to play with man as the football
of chance. Whatever may be done by man will prove unavailing if Fate
or Destiny has decreed otherwise. Out of such a philosophy of life
comes the story of OEdipus. The modern conception is that expressed by
Shakspere:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Still later Henley in his one great poem has expressed the thought
with vigor,--
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods there be
For my unconquerable soul!
With unfaltering aim Hawthorne shows that each character works out its
own destiny. That man is helpless, the sport of gods, the football of
Fate, is disproved by the patient transformation in the character of
Hester.
Some one has well characterized _The Scarlet Letter_ as "a drama of
the spirit." It is a story such as only one who had brooded deeply on
the problem of evil could write. Hawthorne was a "solitary brooder
upon life." Every one who knew him testified to this impression. When
William Dean Howells, a young man from Ohio, knocked at the door of
the Wayside Cottage, a letter of introduction in his hand, and a
feeling of hero-worship in his heart, he was ushered into the presence
of the great romancer, who advanced "carrying his head with a heavy
forward droop" and with pondering pace. His look was "somber and
brooding--the look of a man who had dealt faithfully and therefore
sorrowfully with that problem of evil which forever attracted and
forever evaded Hawthorne."
Hawthorne impressed all who met him with his reserve and shyness. Many
stories are told to illustrate this quality. Hawthorne was once a
visitor at a club where a number of literary men had gathered. The
taciturnity of Hawthorne was more impressive than the loquacity of the
witty Holmes. After Hawthorne had left Emerson said, "Hawthorne rides
his dark horse well." George William Curtis relates this anecdote:
"...I recall the silent and preternatural vigor with which, on one
occasion, he wielded his paddle to counteract the bad rowing of a
friend who conscientiously considered it his duty to do something and
not let Hawthorne work alone, but who with every stroke neutralized
all Hawthorne's efforts. I suppose he would have struggled until he
fell senseless rather than to ask his friend to desist. His principle
seemed to be, if a man cannot understand without talking to him, it
is quite useless to talk, because it is immaterial whether such a man
understands or not."
Hawthorne's father was a man of the sea, a man of few words, and it is
sometimes said that the romancer inherited his shy and reserved
disposition from his father. But his mother was not behind the father
in reserve. After her husband's death she shut herself up in
Hindoo-like seclusion and lived the life of a hermit for more than
forty years.
Hawthorne gives us an interesting account of his boyhood in an
autobiographical note to his friend Stoddard. "When I was eight or
nine years old, my mother, with her three children, took up her
residence on the banks of the Sebago Lake, in Maine, where the family
owned a large tract of land; and here I ran quite wild ... fishing all
day long, or shooting with an old fowling-piece; but reading a good
deal too, on the rainy days, especially in _Shakspere_ and _The
Pilgrim's Progress_."
More pertinent as to his habits of loneliness is the following account
of how he lived for nine or ten years after his graduation from
Bowdoin. "I had always," he writes, "a natural tendency (it appears to
have been on the paternal side) toward seclusion; and this I now
indulged to the utmost, so that, for months together, I scarcely held
human intercourse outside of my own family, seldom going out except at
twilight, or only to take the nearest way to the most convenient
solitude, which was oftenest the seashore.... Having spent so much of
my boyhood and youth from my native place, I had very few
acquaintances in Salem, and during the nine or ten years that I spent
there, in this solitary way, I doubt whether so much as twenty people
in the town were aware of my existence."
Such was the solitariness of the youthful Hawthorne. Is it surprising
that in the fiction of the mature man there should be a pervading
sense of remoteness, of silences that fascinate, of mysteries that
charm?
LV
MAX MUeLLER'S RECOLLECTIONS OF EMERSON, LOWELL, AND HOLMES
Living at Oxford, writes Max Mueller, I have had the good fortune of
receiving visits from Emerson, Dr. Wendell Holmes, and Lowell, to
speak of the brightest stars only. Each of them stayed at our house
for several days, so that I could take them in at leisure, while
others had to be taken at one gulp, often between one train and the
next. Oxford has a great attraction for all Americans, and it is a
pleasure to see how completely they feel at home in the memories of
the place. The days when Emerson, Wendell Holmes, and Lowell were
staying with us, the breakfasts and luncheons, the teas and dinners,
and the delightful walks through college halls, chapels and gardens
are possessions forever....
I do not wonder that philosophers by profession had nothing to say to
his (Emerson's) essays because they did not seem to advance their
favorite inquiries beyond the point they had reached before. But there
were many people, particularly in America, to whom these rhapsodies
did more good than any learned disquisitions or carefully arranged
sermons. There is in them what attracts us so much in the ancients,
freshness, directness, self-confidence, unswerving loyalty to truth,
as far as they could see it. He had no one to fear, no one to please.
Socrates or Plato, if suddenly brought to life in America, might have
spoken like Emerson, and the effect produced by Emerson was certainly
like that produced by Socrates in olden times.
What Emerson's personal charm must have been in earlier life we can
only conjecture from the rapturous praises bestowed on him by his
friends, even during his lifetime.... And his influence was not
confined to the American mind. I have watched it growing in England. I
can still remember the time when even experienced judges spoke of his
essays as mere declamations, as poetical rhapsodies, as poor
imitations of Carlyle. Then gradually one man after another found
something in Emerson which was not to be found in Carlyle,
particularly his loving heart, his tolerant spirit, his comprehensive
sympathy with all that was or was meant to be good and true, even
though to his own mind it was neither the one nor the other....
Another eminent American who often honored my quiet home at Oxford was
James Russell Lowell, for a long time United States minister in
England. He was a professor and at the same time a politician and a
man of the world. Few essays are so brimful of interesting facts and
original reflections as his essays entitled _Among my Books_.
Lowell's conversation was inexhaustible, his information astonishing.
Pleasant as he was, even as an antagonist, he would occasionally lose
his temper and use very emphatic language. I was once sitting next to
him when I heard him stagger his neighbor, a young lady, by bursting
out with, "But, madam, I do not accept your major premise!" Poor
thing, she evidently was not accustomed to such language, and not
acquainted with that terrible term. She collapsed, evidently quite at
a loss as to what gift on her part Mr. Lowell declined to accept.
Sometimes even the most harmless remark about America would call forth
very sharp replies from him. Everybody knows that the salaries paid by
America to her diplomatic staff are insufficient, and no one knew it
better than he himself. But when the remark was made in his presence
that the United States treated their diplomatic representatives
stingily, he fired up, and discoursed most eloquently on the
advantages of high thoughts and humble living....
I lost the pleasure of shaking hands with Longfellow during his stay
in England. Though I have been more of a fixture at Oxford than most
professors, I was away during the vacation when he paid his visit to
our university, and thus lost seeing a poet to whom I felt strongly
attracted, not only by the general spirit of his poetry, which was
steeped in German thought, but as the translator of several of my
father's poems.
I was more fortunate with Dr. Wendell Holmes. His arrival in England
had been proclaimed beforehand, and one naturally remained at home in
order to be allowed to receive him. His hundred days in England were
one uninterrupted triumphal progress. When he arrived at Liverpool he
found about three hundred invitations waiting for him. Though he was
accompanied by a most active and efficient daughter, he had at once to
engage a secretary to answer this deluge of letters. And though he
was past eighty, he never spared himself, and was always ready to see
and to be seen. He was not only an old, but a ripe and mellow man.
There was no subject on which one could touch which was not familiar
to the autocrat of the breakfast table. His thoughts and his words
were ready, and one felt that it was not for the first time that the
subject had been carefully thought out and talked out by him. That he
should have been able to stand all the fatigue of the journey and the
constant claims on his ready wit seemed to me marvelous. I had the
pleasure of showing him the old buildings of Oxford. He seemed to know
them all, and had something to ask and say about every one. When we
came to Magdalen College, he wanted to see and to measure the elms. He
was very proud of some elms in America, and he had actually brought
some string with which he had measured the largest tree he knew in his
own country. He proceeded to measure one of our finest elms in
Magdalen College, and when he found that it was larger than his
American giant, he stood before it admiring it, without a single word
of envy or disappointment.
I had, however, a great fright while he was staying at our house. He
had evidently done too much, and after our first dinner party he had
feverish shivering fits, and the doctor whom I sent for declared at
once that he must keep perfectly quiet in bed, and attend no more
parties of any kind. This was a great disappointment to myself and to
a great many of my friends. But at his time of life the doctor's
warning could not be disregarded, and I had, at all events, the
satisfaction of sending him off to Cambridge safe and sound. I had
him several days quite to myself, and there were few subjects which we
did not discuss. We mostly agreed, but even where we did not, it was a
real pleasure to differ from him. We discussed the greatest and the
smallest questions, and on every one he had some wise and telling
remarks to pour out. I remember one conversation while we were sitting
at an old wainscoted room at All Souls', ornamented with the arms of
former fellows. It had been at first the library of the college, then
one of the fellows' rooms, and lastly a lecture room. We were deep in
the old question of the true relation between the divine and human in
man, and here again, as on all other questions, everything seemed to
be clear and evident to his mind. Perhaps I ought not to repeat what
he said to me when we parted: "I have had much talk with people in
England; with you I have had a real conversation." We understood each
other and wondered how it was that men so often misunderstood one
another. I told him that it was the badness of our language, he
thought it was the badness of our tempers. Perhaps we were both right.
With him again good-by was good-by for life, and at such moments one
wonders indeed how kindred souls became separated, and one feels
startled and repelled at the thought that, such as they were on earth,
they can never meet again. And yet there is continuity in the world,
there is no flaw, no break anywhere, and what has been will surely be
again, though how it will be we cannot know, and if only we trust in
the wisdom that pervades the whole universe, we need not know.
LVI
HOWELLS CALLS ON EMERSON, AND DESCRIBES LONGFELLOW
In 1860 William Dean Howells, now one of the foremost literary
influences in the English-speaking world, was a young man writing for
the _Ohio State Journal_ of Columbus. Several of his poems had been
kindly received and published by the _Atlantic Monthly_, so that the
young lady from New England who screamed with surprise at seeing the
_Atlantic_ on a western table and cried, "Why, have you got the
_Atlantic Monthly out here_?" could be met with, "There are several
contributors to the _Atlantic_ in Columbus." The several were Howells
and J.J. Piatt. But to be an accepted contributor to the _Atlantic_
was not enough. Howells must see the literary celebrities of New
England. Emerson and Bayard Taylor he had seen and heard in Columbus,
but Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes, and Whittier were the
literary saints at whose shrine he wished to burn the sacred incense
of his adoring soul.
From Hawthorne he received a card introducing him to Emerson. Emerson
was then about sixty, although nothing about him suggested an old man.
After some conversation on general topics, Emerson began to talk of
Hawthorne, praising Hawthorne's fine personal qualities. "But his
last book," he added, reflectively, "is mere mush." This criticism
related to the _Marble Faun_. Of course, such a comment shocked
Howells, whose sense of literary values was much keener than
Emerson's. "Emerson had, in fact," writes Howells, "a defective sense
as to specific pieces of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in
the wrong place, especially among the new things, and he failed to see
the worth of much that was fine and precious beside the line of his
fancy."
Then Emerson made some inquiry about a Michigan young man who had been
sending some of his poetry to Emerson. Howells was embarrassed to be
obliged to say that he knew nothing of the Michigan poet. Later
Emerson asked whether he had become acquainted with the poems of Mr.
William Henry Channing. Howells replied that he knew them only through
the criticism of Poe.
"Whose criticisms?" asked Emerson.
"Poe's," replied Howells.
"Oh," Emerson cried after a thoughtful moment, "you mean _the jingle
man_!"
This was a moment of confusion and embarrassment for Howells. Had the
vituperative pen of Poe ever thrown off more stinging criticism than
that? "_The jingle man!_"
Emerson turned the conversation to Howells himself and asked him what
he had written for the _Atlantic_. Howells replied, and Emerson took
down the bound volumes and carefully affixed Howells' initials to the
poems. "He followed me to the door, still speaking of poetry, and as
he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might very well give
a pleasant hour to it now and then." This was a shock to Howells. "A
pleasant hour!" Howells was intending to consecrate all time and
eternity to it, and here is the Sage of Concord coolly speaking of
poetry as though it were some trifling diversion, like billiards or
whist.
Later in life when Howells resided in Cambridge he had abundant
opportunity to become acquainted with Longfellow, whom in _Literary
Friends and Acquaintance_ he calls the "White Mr. Longfellow."
"He was the most perfectly modest man I ever saw, ever imagined, but
he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe any one, the coarsest,
the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the years when I began to know
him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which mixed with it were of
iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect silver, while that pearly
tone of his complexion, which Appleton so admired, lost itself in the
wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he had a kind of spring in
his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought lifted him from the
ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a Cambridge street; you
felt that the encounter made you a part of literary history, and set
you apart with him for the moment from the poor and mean. When he
appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified the ugliest
and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York. You
could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same
provision-man as he, for Longfellow remained as constant to his
tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his
proofs back to the printer himself, and we often found ourselves
together at the University Press, where _The Atlantic Monthly_ used to
be printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a
fit atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he
wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth,
regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical,
and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the
time I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing
paper, though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct
in shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an
inch. I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but
whether they were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely
not. Towards the last he no longer sent the poems to the magazines in
his own hand, but they were always signed in autograph.
"I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he
said, with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied;
if it were not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a
friend to stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell
was; he had not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet
with the Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for
pleasure except on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he
loved walking in his youth. In this and in some other things
Longfellow was more European than American, more Latin than Saxon. He
once said quaintly that one got a great deal of exercise in putting on
and off one's overcoat and overshoes....
"He was patient, as I said of all things, and gentle beyond all mere
gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his
mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm, and of course, it
was braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did
not find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his
friends, and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some
things said of Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery
times; he said to the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend,
and he must leave their company if they continued to assail him.
"But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked
the large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with, on their human
side, and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather
strange in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from our
environments. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he
was not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can
come only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of
the Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was
Longfellow to the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to
one another. He and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never
heard him mention Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or
Emerson. I think his reticence about his contemporaries was largely
due to his reluctance from criticism: he was the finest artist of
them all, and if he praised he must have praised with the reservations
of an honest man. Of younger writers he was willing enough to speak.
No new contributor made his mark in the magazine unnoted by him, and
sometimes I showed him verse in manuscript which gave me peculiar
pleasure. I remember his liking for the first piece that Mr. Maurice
Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the fresh flavor of it and inhaled
its wild new fragrance."
LVII
LONGFELLOW, THE UNIVERSAL POET