Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see
Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester
Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and
Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon;
and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could
not have been got into any story that one could respect, and must have
been difficult even in a Heinesque poem.
I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it
was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I
stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell’s letter to
Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to
have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of
me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his
praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne,
and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me,
doubly enriched by Hawthorne’s keeping. But now if I were to see him at
all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of
the cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very
modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was
already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw
was to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the
road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made
in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius
and the young British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming quite
down to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with a
grassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill. As I
approached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climb
into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and
I wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some
easier means of escaping me.
The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose to
have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the
presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advanced
carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I
decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky man
of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many
pictures of it. But Hawthorne’s look was different from that of any
picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look
of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt
faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which
forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means
troubled; it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him better and
saw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that one
night at Longfellow’s table, when one of the guests happened to speak of
the photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell
said, after a glance at it, “Yes, it’s good; but it hasn’t his fine
‘accipitral’ [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike. D.W.]
look.”
In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of keen
alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I
seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful
eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth.
Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I
remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He
was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have
instantly felt him to be a personage.
I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection of
parting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, and
making me shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments of the
demoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked if
I would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where he
smoked in the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I
did not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill
together. At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over the
Concord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place on it
beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he talked while he smoked.
Heaven preserved me from the folly of trying to tell him how much his
books had been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we
got on better for this interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I dare
say, for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this
seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because he was so lately from
Europe, where our great men are always seen through the wrong end of the
telescope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and asked me whether I
cared as much for meeting them as I should care for meeting the famous
English authors. I professed that I cared much more, though whether this
was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne doubted it at the
time. But he said nothing in comment, and went on to speak generally of
Europe and America. He was curious about the West, which he seemed to
fancy much more purely American, and said he would like to see some part
of the country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damned
shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I thought the West must
finally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had in great numbers,
and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some proofs
of their present influence, though I could think of none outside of
politics, which I thought they affected wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne
was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had
no more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or
Lowell had.
With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to
speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite
beautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and
suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the
suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then
he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen
any of the notable people. I answered that I had met no one but himself,
as yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I did not
think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much
because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had
written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau
prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other
human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near
the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not
displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next
neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That
surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention,
that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he
entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not
be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the
immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is
still strange to his countrymen.
Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the
pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top,
and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to
pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent
together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his
words. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would
have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was a
great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy
kindness, I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book case,
where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves,
and said, coldly, “This is my library.” I knew that men were his books,
and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that
he should care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own
romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my
finger on the ‘Blithedale Romance’ and said that I preferred that to the
others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans
liked that best too.
Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take
leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me
come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I
liked. I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things;
and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got
away, to be, “I find this young man worthy.” The quaintness, the little
stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was
not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat
with joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cordial
as so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose that
nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.
Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great man
than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense
of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as
I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble
sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his
younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is
without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid
him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did
nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps
very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything,
for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early
life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not
the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan
quality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or
unwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if not
quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether of
potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness in
you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have good
hearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, if
they knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had nothing of this
about him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic. I
thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes
had seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the
Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the world
the last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished from
his hand; the ‘Marble Faun’ had worthily followed, at a somewhat longer
interval than usual, the ‘Blithedale Romance’, and the ‘House of Seven
Gables’, and the ‘Scarlet Letter’, and had, perhaps carried his name
higher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was reading
it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him
that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his
life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches
more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were
further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race has
received from any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new
Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that
they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar difference
from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his
difference from all men evermore.
I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image
of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of
shame for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it
would be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would
be simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be
sketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging
into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there
was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling,
but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept
Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves his
intimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothing
teasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne’s impalpability, such as I
afterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no
fault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of
contact with such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom
without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less
veridical for all that.