It is with a sad pleasure that the readers of this magazine will see in
its pages the first chapter of "The Dolliver Romance," the latest record
of Nathaniel Hawthorne meant for the public eye. The charm of his
description and the sweet flow of his style will lead all who open upon
it to read on to the closing paragraph. With its harmonious cadences the
music of this quaint, mystic overture is suddenly hushed, and we seem to
hear instead the tolling of a bell in the far distance. The procession
of shadowy characters which was gathering in our imaginations about the
ancient man and the little child who come so clearly before our sight
seems to fade away, and in its place a slow-pacing train winds through
the village-road and up the wooded hill-side until it stops at a little
opening among the tall trees. There the bed is made in which he whose
dreams had peopled our common life with shapes and thoughts of beauty
and wonder is to take his rest. This is the end of the first chapter we
have been reading, and of that other first chapter in the life of an
Immortal, whose folded pages will be opened, we trust, in the light of a
brighter day.
It was my fortune to be among the last of the friends who looked upon
Hawthorne's living face. Late in the afternoon of the day before he left
Boston on his last journey I called upon him at the hotel where he was
staying. He had gone out but a moment before. Looking along the street,
I saw a figure at some distance in advance which could only be his,--but
how changed from his former port and figure! There was no mistaking the
long iron-gray locks, the carriage of the head, and the general look of
the natural outlines and movement; but he seemed to have shrunken in all
his dimensions, and faltered along with an uncertain, feeble step, as if
every movement were an effort. I joined him, and we walked together half
an hour, during which time I learned so much of his state of mind and
body as could be got at without worrying him with suggestive
questions,--my object being to form an opinion of his condition, as I
had been requested to do, and to give him some hints that might be
useful to him on his journey.
His aspect, medically considered, was very unfavorable. There were
persistent local symptoms, referred especially to the stomach,--"boring
pain," distension, difficult digestion, with great wasting of flesh and
strength. He was very gentle, very willing to answer questions, very
docile to such counsel as I offered him, but evidently had no hope of
recovering his health. He spoke as if his work were done, and he should
write no more.
With all his obvious depression, there was no failing noticeable in his
conversational powers. There was the same backwardness and hesitancy
which in his best days it was hard for him to overcome, so that talking
with him was almost like love-making, and his shy, beautiful soul had to
be wooed from its bashful pudency like an unschooled maiden. The calm
despondency with which he spoke about himself confirmed the unfavorable
opinion suggested by his look and history.
The journey on which Mr. Hawthorne was setting out, when I saw him, was
undertaken for the benefit of his health. A few weeks earlier he had
left Boston on a similar errand in company with Mr. William D. Ticknor,
who had kindly volunteered to be his companion in a trip which promised
to be of some extent and duration, and from which this faithful friend,
whose generous devotion deserves the most grateful remembrance, hoped to
bring him back restored, or at least made stronger. Death joined the
travellers, but it was not the invalid whom he selected as his victim.
The strong man was taken, and the suffering valetudinarian found himself
charged with those last duties which he was so soon to need at the hands
of others. The fatigue of mind and body thus substituted for the
recreation which he greatly needed must have hastened the course of his
disease, or at least have weakened his powers of resistance to no small
extent.
Once more, however, in company with his old college-friend and
classmate, Ex-President Pierce, he made the attempt to recover his lost
health by this second journey. My visit to him on the day before his
departure was a somewhat peculiar one, partly of friendship, but partly
also in compliance with the request I have referred to.
I asked only such questions as were like to afford practical hints as to
the way in which he should manage himself on his journey. It was more
important that he should go away as hopeful as might be than that a
searching examination should point him to the precise part diseased,
condemning him to a forlorn self-knowledge such as the masters of the
art of diagnosis sometimes rashly substitute for the ignorance which is
comparative happiness. Being supposed to remember something of the craft
pleasantly satirized in the chapter before us, I volunteered, not "an
infallible panacea of my own distillation," but some familiar
palliatives which I hoped might relieve the symptoms of which he
complained most. The history of his disease must, I suppose, remain
unwritten, and perhaps it is just as well that it should be so. Men of
sensibility and genius hate to have their infirmities dragged out of
them by the roots in exhaustive series of cross-questionings and
harassing physical explorations, and he who has enlarged the domain of
the human soul may perhaps be spared his contribution to the pathology
of the human body. At least, I was thankful that it was not my duty to
sound all the jarring chords of this sensitive organism, and that a few
cheering words and the prescription of a not ungrateful sedative and
cordial or two could not lay on me the reproach of having given him his
"final bitter taste of this world, perhaps doomed to be a recollected
nauseousness in the next."
There was nothing in Mr. Hawthorne's aspect that gave warning of so
sudden an end as that which startled us all. It seems probable that he
died by the gentlest of all modes of release, fainting, without the
trouble and confusion of coming back to life,--a way of ending liable to
happen in any disease attended with much debility.
Mr. Hawthorne died in the town of Plymouth, New Hampshire, on the
nineteenth of May. The moment, and even the hour, could not be told, for
he had passed away without giving any sign of suffering, such as might
call the attention of the friend near him. On Monday, the twenty-third
of May, his body was given back to earth in the place where he had long
lived, and which he had helped to make widely known,--the ancient town
of Concord.
The day of his burial will always live in the memory of all who shared
in its solemn, grateful duties. All the fair sights and sweet sounds of
the opening season mingled their enchantments as if in homage to the
dead master, who, as a lover of Nature and a student of life, had given
such wealth of poetry to our New-England home, and invested the stern
outlines of Puritan character with the colors of romance. It was the
bridal day of the season, perfect in light as if heaven were looking on,
perfect in air as if Nature herself were sighing for our loss. The
orchards were all in fresh flower,--
"One boundless blush, one white-empurpled shower
Of mingled blossoms";--
the banks were literally blue with violets; the elms were putting out
their tender leaves, just in that passing aspect which Raphael loved to
pencil in the backgrounds of his holy pictures, not as yet printing deep
shadows, but only mottling the sunshine at their feet. The birds were in
full song; the pines were musical with the soft winds they sweetened.
All was in faultless accord, and every heart was filled with the beauty
that flooded the landscape.
The church where the funeral services were performed was luminous with
the whitest blossoms of the luxuriant spring. A great throng of those
who loved him, of those who honored his genius, of those who held him in
kindly esteem as a neighbor and friend, filled the edifice. Most of
those who were present wished to look once more at the features which
they remembered with the lights and shadows of life's sunshine upon
them. The cold moonbeam of death lay white on the noble forehead and
still, placid features; but they never looked fuller of power than in
this last aspect with which they met the eyes that were turned upon
them.
In a patch of sunlight, flecked by the shade of tall, murmuring pines,
at the summit of a gently swelling mound where the wild-flowers had
climbed to find the light and the stirring of fresh breezes, the tired
poet was laid beneath the green turf. Poet let us call him, though his
chants were not modulated in the rhythm of verse. The element of poetry
is air: we know the poet by his atmospheric effects, by the blue of his
distances, by the softening of every hard outline he touches, by the
silvery mist in which he veils deformity and clothes what is common so
that it changes to awe-inspiring mystery, by the clouds of gold and
purple which are the drapery of his dreams. And surely we have had but
one prose-writer who could be compared with him in aerial perspective,
if we may use the painter's term. If Irving is the Claude of our
unrhymed poetry, Hawthorne is its Poussin.
This is not the occasion for the analysis and valuation of Hawthorne's
genius. If the reader wishes to see a thoughtful and generous estimate
of his powers, and a just recognition of the singular beauty of his
style, he may turn to the number of this magazine published in May,
1860. The last effort of Hawthorne's creative mind is before him in the
chapter here printed. The hand of the dead master shows itself in every
line. The shapes and scenes he pictures slide at once into our
consciousness, as if they belonged there as much as our own homes and
relatives. That limpid flow of expression, never laboring, never
shallow, never hurried nor uneven nor turbid, but moving on with
tranquil force, clear to the depths of its profoundest thought, shows
itself with all its consummate perfections. Our literature could ill
spare the rich ripe autumn of such a life as Hawthorne's, but he has
left enough to keep his name in remembrance as long as the language in
which he shaped his deep imaginations is spoken by human lips.