Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's
fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle
Horace--His vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's
first tears--The heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine--
The chief incident of the reception--Blithedale and Brook
Farm--Notes from real life--Rough draughts--Paths of
composition--The struggle with the Pensioner--Hawthorne's
method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden walls and a
roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of
"The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President"--The most
homeless people in the world."
The sky that overhung Hawthorne's departure from Lenox was gray with
impending snow, and the flakes had begun to fall ere the vehicle in
which his family was ensconced had reached the railway station in
Pittsfield. Travel had few amenities in those days. The cars were
all plain cars, with nothing to recommend them except that they went
tolerably fast--from twenty to thirty miles an hour. They were chariots
of delight to the children, who were especially happy in occupying the
last car of the train, from the rear windows of which they could look
down upon the tracks, which seemed to slide miraculously away from
beneath them. The conductor collected the tickets--a mysterious rite.
The gradually whitening landscape fled past, becoming ever more level
as we proceeded; by-and-by there was a welcome unpacking of the
luncheon-basket, and all the while there were the endless questions to
be asked and faithfully answered. It was already dark by the time we
were bundled out at the grimy shed which was called the depot, at West
Newton, where we were met by the Horace Manns, and somehow the transit
to the latter's house, which we were to occupy for the winter, was made.
The scene was gloomy and unpleasant; the change from the mountains
of the west depressing; and, for my part, I cannot remember anything
agreeable in this raw little suburb. American life half a century ago
had a great deal of rawness about it, and its external aspect was ugly
beyond present belief. We may be a less virtuous nation now than we were
then, but we are indescribably more good to look at. And the West Newton
of to-day, as compared with that of 1851, will serve for an illustration
of this truth.
Horace Mann's house was a small frame dwelling, painted white, with
green blinds, and furnished with a furnace stiflingly hot. One of
the first things the baby did was to crawl under the sofa in the
sitting-room and lay her small fingers against the radiator or register,
or whatever it is called, through which the heat came. She withdrew them
with a bitter outcry, and on the tip of each was a blister as big as the
tip itself. We had no glorious out-door playground in West Newton; it
was a matter of back yards and sullen streets. The snow kept piling up,
week after week; but there was no opportunity to put it to its proper
use of coasting. The only redeeming feature of the physical situation
that I recall is the momentous fact of a first pair of red-topped boots.
They were very uncomfortable, and always either wet or stiff as iron
from over-dryness; but they made their wearer as happy as they have made
all other boys since boots began. A boy of six with high boots is bigger
than most men.
But if the outward life was on the whole unprepossessing, inward
succulence was not lacking. We had the Manns, to begin with, and the
first real acquaintance between the two sets of children opened here.
Mary Peabody, my mother's elder sister, had married Horace Mann, whose
name is honorably identified with the development in this country of
common-school education. They had three children, of about our age,
all boys. A statue in bronze of Horace Mann stands in front of the
State-house in Boston, and the memory of the strenuous reformer well
merits the distinction. He took things seriously and rather grimly, and
was always emphatically in earnest. He was a friend of George Combe, the
phrenologist, after whom his second boy was named; and he was himself
so ardent a believer in the new science that when his younger son,
Benjamin, was submitted to him for criticism at a very early age he
declared, after a strict phrenological examination, that he was not
worth bringing up. But children's heads sometimes undergo strange
transformations as they grow up, and Benjamin lived to refute abundantly
his father's too hasty conclusion in his case. He became eminent as an
entomologist; George followed the example of his father on educational
lines. Horace, who died comparatively early, was an enthusiastic
naturalist, who received the unstinted praise and confidence of the
great Agassiz. My uncle Horace, as I remember him, was a very tall
man, of somewhat meagre build, a chronic sufferer from headaches and
dyspepsia. His hair was sandy, straight, rather long, and very thick; it
hung down uncompromisingly round his head. His face was a long square,
with a mouth and chin large and immitigably firm. His eyes were
reinforced by a glistening pair of gold-bowed spectacles. He always wore
a long-skirted black coat. His aspect was a little intimidating to small
people; but there were lovely qualities in his nature, his character
was touchingly noble and generous, and the world knows the worth of his
intellect. He was anxious, exacting, and dogmatic, and was not always
able to concede that persons who differed from him in opinion could
be morally normal. This was especially noticeable when the topic of
abolition happened to come up for discussion; Horace Mann was ready
to out-Garrison Garrison; he thought Uncle Tom's Cabin a somewhat
milk-and-water tract. He was convinced that Tophet was the future home
of all slave-holders, and really too good for them, and he practically
worshipped the negro. Had he occupied a seat in Congress at that
juncture, it is likely that the civil war might have been started a
decade sooner than it was. My father and mother were much more moderate
in their view of the situation, and my mother used to say that if
slavery was really so evil and demoralizing a thing as the abolitionists
asserted, it was singular that they should canonize all the subjects of
the institution. But, as a rule, all controversy with the indignant zeal
of our relative was avoided; in his eyes any approach to a philosophical
attitude on the burning question was a crime. Nor were his convictions
less pronounced on the subject of total abstinence from liquor and
tobacco. Now, my father smoked an occasional cigar, and it once came
about that he was led to mention the fact in Horace Mann's hearing. The
reformer's bristles were set in a moment. "Do I understand you to say,
Mr. Hawthorne, that you actually use tobacco?" "Yes, I smoke a cigar
once in a while," replied my father, comfortably. Horace Mann could not
keep his seat; he started up and paced the room menacingly. He had a
high admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for him
as a man, and this infidelity to the true faith seemed to him the more
appalling. But he would be true to his colors at all costs, and after
a few moments he planted himself, tall and tragic, before his
interlocutor, and spoke, in a husky voice, to this effect: "Then, Mr.
Hawthorne, it is my duty to tell you that I no longer have the same
respect for you that I have had." Then he turned and strode from the
room, leaving the excommunicated one to his reflections. Faithful are
the wounds of a friend, and my father was as much touched as he was
amused by this example of my uncle's candor. Of course, there was a
great vacuum in the place where my uncle's sense of humor might have
been; but there are a time and place for such men as he, and more than
once the men without sense of humor have moved the world.
In addition to the Manns, there were visitors--the succession of whom,
indeed, was henceforth to continue till the end of my father's earthly
pilgrimage. Among the earliest to arrive was Grace Greenwood, wading
energetically to our door through the December snow. She was one of the
first, if not the first, of the tribe of women correspondents; she had
lately returned, I think, from England, and the volume of her letters
from that strange country was in everybody's hands. She was then a young
woman, large and handsome, with dark hair and complexion, and large,
expressive eyes, harmonious, aquiline features, and a picturesque
appearance. She wore her hair in abundant curls; she exhaled an
atmosphere of romance, of graceful and ardent emotions, and of almost
overpowering sentiment. In fact, she had a genuine gift for expression
and description, and she made an impression in contemporary letters. We
might smile now--and, in truth, we sometimes did then--over some of her
pages; but much of her work would still be called good, if resuscitated
from the dusty book-shelves of the past. I remember one passage in her
English Letters which was often quoted in our family circle as a typical
illustration of the intensity of the period: "The first tears," wrote
Grace, "that I had shed since leaving my dear native land fell fast into
the red heart of an English rose!" Nothing could be better than that;
but the volume was full of similar felicities. You were swimming in
radiant tides of enthusiastic appreciation, quotations from the poets
and poetical rhapsodies; incidents of travel, humorous, pathetic, and
graphic; swirling eddies of word-painting, of moral and ethical and
historical reflection; withal, an immense, amiable, innocent, sprawling
temperament. And as was her book, so was Grace herself; indeed, if any
one could outdo the book in personal conversation, Grace was that happy
individual. What she accomplished when she embarked, full-sailed, upon
the topic of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may
be pictured to themselves by persons endowed with the rudiments of
imagination; I must not attempt to adorn this sober page with an
attempted reproduction of the scene. Mortal language reeled and cracked
under the strain of giving form to her admiration; but it was so honest
and well meant that it could not but give pleasure even in the midst of
bewilderment. My father bowed his head with a painful smile; but I dare
say it did him good when the ordeal was over.
At this time the reverberations of the European revolutionary year,
1848, were still breaking upon our shores. President Polk had given
mortal offence to Austria by sending over a special commissioner to
determine whether the seceding state of Hungary might be recognized as
a belligerent. In 1850 the Austrian representative, Baron Huelsmann,
had entered upon a correspondence with our own Daniel Webster. The baron
remonstrated, and Daniel mounted upon the national bird and soared in
the patriotic empyrean. The eloquence of the Secretary of State perhaps
aroused unwarranted expectations in the breasts of the struggling
revolutionists, and the Hungarian man of eloquence set out for the
United States to take the occasion by the forelock. Not since the visit
of Lafayette had any foreigner been received here with such testimonials
of public enthusiasm, or listened to by such applausive audiences:
certainly none had ever been sent home again with less wool to show for
so much cry. In 1851, the name of Kossuth was the most popular in the
country, and when it was learned that he had accepted an invitation to
speak in our little West Newton, we felt as if we were almost embarked
upon a campaign--upon an altruistic campaign of emancipation against the
Hapsburg oppressor. The excitement was not confined to persons of mature
age and understanding; it raged among the smaller fry, and every boy
was a champion of Kossuth. The train conveying the hero from New York
to Boston (whence he was to return to West Newton after the reception
there) was timed to pass through our midst at three o 'clock in the
afternoon, and our entire population was at the track-side to see it go
by. After one or two false alarms it came in sight round the curve, the
smokestack of the engine swathed in voluminous folds of Old Glory. The
smoke-stacks of those days were not like our scientific present-day
ones; they were huge, inverted cones, affording ample surface for
decoration. The train did not stop at our station; but Kossuth no doubt
looked out of the window as he flew past and bowed his acknowledgments
of our cheers. He was to return to us the next day, and, meanwhile, the
town-hall, or the church, or whatever building it was that was to be the
scene of his West Newton triumph was put in order for his reception. The
person who writes these words, whose ears had eagerly devoured the story
of the Hungarian revolt, wished to give the august visitor some personal
assurance of his distinguished consideration, and it was finally agreed
by his indulgent parents that he should print upon a card the legend,
"GOD BLESS YOU, KOSSUTH," and be afforded an opportunity personally to
present it to the guest of the nation. Many cards had been used and
cast aside before the scribe, his fingers tremulous with emotion, had
produced something which the Hungarian might be reasonably expected to
find legible. Then, supported by his father and mother, and with his
uncles, aunts, and cousins doubtless not far off, he proceeded proudly
but falteringly to the scene of the presentation. He dimly recalls a
large interior space, profusely decorated with stars and stripes, and
also the colors of Hungary. At the head of the room was a great placard
with "WELCOME, KOSSUTH" inscribed upon it. There was a great throng
and press of men and women, a subdued, omnipresent roar of talk, and a
setting of the tide towards the place where the patriot stood to receive
our personal greetings. The scribe whom I have mentioned, being as
yet brief of stature, was unable to see anything except coat-tails
and petticoats, until of a sudden there was a breaking away of these
obstacles and he found himself in close proximity to a gentleman
of medium height, strongly built, with a mop of dark hair framing a
handsome, pale, smiling face, the lower parts of which were concealed
by a thick brown beard. It was Kossuth, and there was that in his
countenance and expression which satisfied all the dreams of his
admirer. He was chatting and shaking hands with the elder persons; and
in a minute we were moving on again, and the printed card, for which
the whole function had been created, had not been presented. At the
last moment, in an agony of apprehension, the boy pulled at his mother's
skirt and whispered piteously, "But my card!" She heard and remembered;
but need was for haste; we had already passed the vantage-point. She
snatched it from the tightly gripping fingers of the bearer, handed
it to Kossuth, and at the same moment, with a gesture, directed his
attention to her small companion. The Hungarian read the inscription
at a glance, looked me in the eyes with a quick smile of comprehension,
and, stepping towards me, laid his hand upon my head. It was a great
moment for me; but as I went away I suddenly dissolved in tears, whether
from the reaction of emotion, or because I had not myself succeeded in
delivering my gift, I cannot now determine. But Kossuth thereby became,
and for years he continued to be, the most superb figure in my political
horizon.
All this while The Blithedale Romance was being written. Inasmuch as it
was finished on the last day of April, 1852, it could not have occupied
the writer more than five months in the composition. Winter was his best
time for literary work, and there was winter enough that year in West
Newton. In the middle of April came the heaviest snowstorm of the
season. Brook Farm (modified in certain respects to suit the conditions)
was the scene of the story, and Brook Farm was within a fair walk of
West Newton. I visited the place some thirty years later, and found the
general topographical features substantially as described in the book.
In 1852 it was ten years since Hawthorne had lived there, and though he
might have renewed his acquaintance with it while the writing was
going on, there is no record of his having done so; and considering the
unfavorable weather, and the fact that the imaginative atmosphere which
writers seek is enhanced by distance in time, just as the physical
effect of a landscape is improved by distance of space, makes it
improbable that he availed himself of the opportunity. His note-books
contain but few comments upon the routine of life of the community; his
letters to his wife (then Sophia Peabody) are somewhat fuller; one can
trace several of these passages, artistically metamorphosed, in the
romance. The episode of the masquerade picnic is based on fact, and the
scene of the recovery of Zenobia's body from the river is a tolerably
close reproduction of an event in Concord, in which, several years
before, Hawthorne had been an actor.
The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the
hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there
are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the
spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse
of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage
containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for
Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old
surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and a red
nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He
leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent,
addressing nobody but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain
intentness. He is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some
former period of his life, but, falling into decay, he now haunts about
the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered. The word
ragamuffin," he adds, with characteristic determination to be exact,
"does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow
or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety, too, and a kind
of dignity in his groggy and red-nosed destitution." Out of this subtle
correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old
Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy.
But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage,
likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Parker's liquor-bar)
where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because, striking though
it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping with the rest of the
fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit upon such a simile,
would have had conscience and self-denial enough, not to mention fine
enough artistic sense, to delete it!
The craftsman's workmanship may occasionally be traced in this way; but,
as a rule, it is difficult to catch a glimpse of him in his creative
moments. If he made rough draughts of his stories, he must have
destroyed them after the stories themselves were completed; for none
such, in the case of his finished products, was left. I have seen
the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was
destroyed by James T. Fields's printers--Fields having at that time
no notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the value that
would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing. All the extant
manuscripts are singularly free from erasures and interlineations; page
after page is clear as a page of print. He would seem to have taught
himself so thoroughly how to write that, by the time the series of his
longer romances began, he was able to say what he wished to say at a
first attempt. He had the habit, undoubtedly, of planning out the work
of each day on the day previous, generally while walking in solitude
either out-of-doors or, if that were impracticable, up and down the
floor of his study. It was this habit which created the pathway along
the summit of the ridge of the hill at Wayside, in Concord; it was a
deeply trodden path, in the hard, root-inwoven soil, hardly nine inches
wide and about two hundred and fifty yards in length. The monotonous
movement of walking seemed to put his mind in the receptive state
favorable for hearing the voices of imagination. The external faculties
were quiescent, the veil of matter was lifted, and he was able to peruse
the vision beyond.
[MAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS]
But there is an important exception to this rule to be noted in the
matter of his fictitious narratives which were posthumously published.
These, as I have elsewhere said, are all concerned with a single
theme--the never-dying man. There are two complete versions of
Septimius, of about equal length, and many passages in the two are
identical. There is a short sketch on somewhat different lines, called
(by the editor) The Bloody Footstep; and there is still another, and
a much more elaborate attempt to embody the idea in the volume which
I have entitled Doctor Grimshawe's Secret. All these, in short, are
studies of one subject, and they were all unsatisfactory to the author.
The true vein of which he had been in search was finally discovered in
The Dolliver Romance, but the author's death prevented its completion.
In this series of posthumous manuscripts there is a unique opportunity
for making a study of the esoteric qualities of my father's style and
methods, and on a future occasion I hope to present the result of my
investigations in this direction. There is, furthermore, in connection
with them, a mass of material of a yet more interesting and interior
character. While writing the Grimshawe, he was deeply perplexed by
certain details of the plot; the meaning of the Pensioner, and his
proper function in the story, was one of these stumbling-blocks. But
the prosperity of the tale depended directly upon the solution of this
problem. Constantly, therefore, in the midst of the composition, he
would break off and enter upon a wrestling-match with the difficulty.
These wrestling-matches are of an absorbing significance; they reveal to
us the very inmost movements of the author's mind. He tries, and
tries again, to get at the idea that continues to elude him; he forms
innumerable hypotheses; he sets forth on the widest excursions; he gets
out of patience with himself and with his Pensioner, and often damns
the latter in good set terms; but he will not give up the struggle; his
resolve to conquer is adamantine, and the conflict is always renewed.
And there it all stands in black and white; one of the most instructive
chapters in literary criticism in the world--the battle of a great
writer with himself. The final issue, after all, was hardly decisive,
for although a tolerable modus vivendi was reached and a truce declared,
it is evident that Hawthorne regarded the entire scheme of the story as
a mistake, and it is concluded in a perfunctory and indifferent manner.
But it may be doubted whether anything of this sort ever took place
in the making of any of the other stories. These depend but in a
subordinate degree upon what is called technically plot interest. The
author's method was to take a natural, even a familiar incident, and
to transmute it into immortal gold by simply elucidating its inner
spiritual significance. The Scarlet Letter is a mere plain story of love
and jealousy; there is no serious attempt to hide the identity of Roger
Chillingworth or the guilt of the minister. The only surprise in The
House of the Seven Gables consists in the revelation of the fact that
Maule reappears after several generations in the person of his modern
descendant. The structure of The Blithedale Romance appears more
complicated; but that is mainly because, in a masterly manner, the
author keeps the structural lines out of sight and concentrates
attention upon the interplay of character. The scaffolding upon which
are hung the splendid draperies of The Marble Faun is, again, of the
simplest formation, though the nature of the materials is unfamiliar.
This is a digression; the present volume, as I have already stated,
is not designed to include--except incidentally-anything in the way of
literary criticism.
Blithedale having been finished and published, the question of where to
settle down permanently once more came up for an answer. Of course, our
sojourn at Mr. Mann's house had been a temporary expedient only; and for
that matter, the Manns, following the example of most Americans before
and since, had rented the place merely as a stepping-stone to something
else. My father's eyes again turned with longing towards the sea-shore;
but the fitting nook for him there still failed to offer itself. People
are naturally disposed to return to places in which they have formerly
lived, and Concord could not but suggest itself to one who had passed
some of the happiest years of his life among its serene pastures and
piney forests. This suggestion, moreover, was supplemented by the
urgent invitations of his old friends there, and Mr. Emerson, who was a
practical man as well as a philosopher, substantiated his arguments by
throwing into the scale a concrete dwelling. It was an edifice which
not even the most imaginative and optimistic of house-agents would have
found it easy to picture as a sumptuous country-seat; it was just four
wooden walls and a roof, and they had been standing for a hundred years
at least. The occupants of this house had seen the British march past
from Boston on the 19th of April, 1775, and a few hours later they had
seen them return along the same dusty highway at a greatly accelerated
pace and under annoying circumstances. There was a legend that a man had
once lived there who had announced that death was not an indispensable
detail of life, and that he for his part intended never to die; but
after many years he had grown weary of the monotony of his success, or
had realized that it would take too long a time to prove himself in
the right, and rather than see the thing through he allowed himself to
depart. The old structure, in its original state, consisted of a big,
brick chimney surrounded by four rooms and an attic, with a kitchen
tacked on at the rear. It stood almost flush with the side-path along
the highway; behind it rose a steep hill-side to a height of about one
hundred feet; in front, on the other side of the road, stretched broad
meadows with a brook flowing through the midst of them. Such conditions
would not seem altogether to favor a man wedded to seclusion.
But the thing was not at this juncture quite so bad as it had been. Mr.
Alcott, whose unselfish devotion to the welfare of the human race made
it incumbent upon his friends to supply him with the means of earthly
subsistence, had been recently domiciled in the house by Mr. Emerson
(how the latter came into possession of it I have forgotten, if ever
I knew), and he had at once proceeded to wreak upon it his unique
architectural talent. At any rate, either he himself or somebody in his
behalf had set up a small gable in the midst of the front, thrown out a
double bow-window, and added a room on the west side. This interrupted
the deadly, four-square uniformity, and suggested further improvements.
Mr. Alcott certainly built the summer-house on the hill-side, and
terraced the hill, which was also planted with apple-trees. Another
summer-house arose in the meadow opposite, which went with the property,
and rustic fences separated the domain from the road. The dwelling was
now fully as commodious as the red house at Lenox, though it had no
Monument Mountain and Stockbridge Bowl to look out upon.
[IMAGE: THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife)]
The estate, comprising, I think, forty-two acres, all told, including
upward of twenty acres of second-growth woodland above the hill,
perfectly useless except for kindling-wood and for the sea-music which
the pine-trees made, was offered to my father at a reasonable enough
figure, to be his own and his heirs' forever. He came over and looked
at the place, thought "The Wayside" would be a good name for it, and
was perhaps helped to decide upon taking it by the felicity of this
appellation. It was close upon the highway, undeniably; but then the
highway was so little travelled that it might almost as well not have
been there. One might, also, plant a high hedge in place of the fence
and make shift to hide behind it. One could enlarge the house as need
demanded; an affluent vegetable garden could be laid out in the meadow,
and fruit and ornamental trees could be added to the slopes of the
hill-side. The village was removed to a distance of a trifle over a
mile, so that the roar of its traffic would not invade this retreat; and
Mr. Emerson sat radiating peace and wisdom between the village and
"The Wayside"; while Mr. Alcott shone with ancillary lustre only a
stone's-throw away. Thoreau and Ellery Channing were tramping about
in the neighborhood, and Judge Hoar and his beautiful sister dispensed
sweetness and light in the village itself. Walden Pond, still secluded
as when only the Indians had seen the sky and the trees reflected in
it, was within a two-mile walk, and the silent Musketaquid stole on its
level way beyond the hill on the other side. Surely, a man might travel
far and not find a spot better suited for work and meditation and
discreet society than Concord was.
But, of course, the necessity of settling down somewhere was a main
consideration. Concord, was inviting in itself, but it was also
recommended by the argument of exclusion; no other place so desirable
and at the same time so easy of attainment happened to present itself.
It did not lie within sound and sight of the ocean; but that was the
worst that could be urged against it. A man must choose, and Concord
was, finally, Hawthorne's choice.
At this epoch he had not contemplated, save in day-dreams, the
possibility of visiting the Old World. His friend, Franklin Pierce, had
just become President-elect, but that fact had not suggested to his mind
the change in his own fortunes which it was destined to bring about.
He was too modest a critic of his own abilities to think that his work
would ever bring him money enough for foreign travel, and, therefore,
in accepting Concord as his home, he believed that he was fixing the
boundaries of his future earthly experience. It was not his ideal;
no imaginative man can ever hope to find that; but as soon as we have
called a place our Home, it acquires a charm that has nothing to do with
material conditions. The best-known song in American poesy has impressed
that truth upon Americans--who are the most homeless people in the
world.