part of Hawthorne's life. Before he left America, although he had been
writing--with several interruptions--for twenty-four years, he had only
just reached a meagre prosperity. I have touched upon the petty clamor
which his Custom-House pictures aroused, and the offensive political
attacks following the Life of Pierce. These disagreeables, scattered
along the way, added to the weary delay that had attended his first
efforts, made the enthusiastic personal welcome with which he everywhere
met in England, and the charm of highly organized society, with its
powerful artistic classes centred upon great capitals there and in
Italy, a very captivating contrast. Still there were drawbacks. The most
serious one was the change in the consular service made during his term
at Liverpool. The consulate there was considered the most lucrative post
in the President's gift, at the time of his appointment. But, to begin
with, Pierce allowed the previous incumbent to resign prospectively, so
that Hawthorne lost entirely the first five months of his tenure. These
were very valuable months, and after the new consul came into office the
dull season set in, reducing his fees materially. Business continued bad
so long, that even up to 1855 little more than a living could be made in
the consulate. In February of that year a bill was passed by Congress,
remodelling the diplomatic and consular system, and fixing the salary of
the Liverpool consul at $7,500,--less than half the amount of the best
annual income from it before that time. The position was one of
importance, and involved an expensive mode of life; so that even before
this bill went into operation, though practising "as stern an economy,"
he wrote home, "as ever I did in my life," Hawthorne could save but
little; and the effect of it would have been not only to prevent his
accomplishing what he took the office for, but even to have imposed loss
upon him. For, in addition to social demands, the mere necessary office
expenses (including the pay of three clerks) were very large, amounting
to some thousands yearly; and the needs of unfortunate fellow-citizens,
to whom Hawthorne could not bring himself to be indifferent, carried off
a good portion of his income. As he says, "If the government chooses to
starve the consul, a good many will starve with him." The most
irritating thing about the new law was that it merely cut down the
consular fees, without bringing the government anything; for the fees
came from business that a notary-public could perform, and the consul
would naturally decline to take it upon himself when his interest in it
was removed. Fortunately, the President was given some discretion about
the date of reappointment, and allowed the old commission to continue
for a time. Meanwhile, Hawthorne was obliged, in anticipation of the new
rule, to alter his mode of life materially. He now planned to give up
the place in the autumn of 1855, and go to Italy; but this was not
carried out till two years later.
Italy charmed him wholly, and he longed to make it his home. There had
not been want of unjust criticism of him in America, while at Liverpool.
When some shipwrecked steamer passengers were thrown upon his hands, for
whom he provided extra-officially, on Mr. Buchanan's (then minister)
refusing to have anything to do with the matter, a newspaper rumor was
started at home that Mr. Hawthorne would do nothing for them until
ordered to by Mr. Buchanan.
"It sickens me," he wrote at that time, "to look back to America. I am
sick to death of the continual fuss and tumult and excitement and bad
blood which we keep up about political topics. If it were not for my
children, I should probably never return."
And on the eve of sailing, he wrote to another friend:--
"I shall go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be very
well contented there."
But his sense of duty, stronger than that of many Americans under
similar circumstances, was rigorously obeyed. We shall see what sort of
reward this fidelity to country won from public opinion at home.
X.
THE LAST ROMANCE.
1860-1863.
There are in the "English Note-Books" several dismal and pathetic
records of tragic cases of brutality or murder on shipboard, which it
was Hawthorne's duty as consul to investigate. These things, as one
might have divined they would, made a very strong and deep impression
upon him; and he tried strenuously to interest the United States
government in bettering the state of the marine by new laws. But though
this evil was and is still quite as monstrous as that of slavery, there
was no means of mixing up prejudice and jealousy with the reform, to
help it along, and he could effect nothing. He resolved, on returning
home, to write some articles--perhaps a volume--exposing the horrors so
calmly overlooked; but the slavery agitation, absorbing everybody,
perhaps discouraged him: the scheme was never carried out. It is a pity;
for, aside from the weight which so eminent a name might have given to a
good cause, the work would have clearly proven the quick, responsive,
practical nature of his humanity--a quality which some persons have seen
fit to deny him--in a case where no question of conflicting rights
divided his sense of duty.
He came to America in June, 1860. For several years the mutterings of
rising war between the States had been growing louder. In June of 1856
he had written to Bridge, expressing great hope that all would yet turn
out well. But so rapidly did the horizon blacken, that later in the same
year he declared that "an actual fissure" seemed to him to be opening
between the two sections of the country. In January, 1857:--
"I regret that you think so doubtfully of the prospects of the Union;
for I should like well enough to hold on to the old thing. And yet I
must confess that I sympathize to a large extent with the Northern
feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a stand. If compelled
to choose, I go for the North. New England is quite as large a lump of
earth as my heart can really take in.... However, I have no kindred with
nor leaning toward the Abolitionists."
He felt, no doubt, that the vital principle of The Union from the
beginning had been compromise, mutual concession, and if it was to be
severed, preferred that it should be peacefully. Still, his moods and
wishes varied as did those of many careful watchers at that time; and he
saw too clearly the arguments on either side to hold fixedly to one
course. In the December after his return, secession began; and for more
than a year following he could not fix his attention upon literary
matters. He wrote little, not even his journal, as Mrs. Hawthorne has
told us, until 1862. Accustomed to respond accurately to every influence
about him, with that sensitized exterior of receptive imagination which
overlay the fixed substance of personal character,--so that, as we have
seen, even a change of climate left its impress on his productions,--it
was not strange that the emotions of horror and pain, the passion of
hate, the splendid heroism which charged the whole atmosphere about him,
now, should absorb his whole sensibility, and paralyze his imagination.
It was no time for quiet observation or creative revery. A new era had
broken upon us, ushered by the wild din of trumpet and cannon, and
battle-cry; an era which was to form new men, and shape a new generation.
He must pause and listen to the agonies of this birth, striving vainly to
absorb the commotion into himself and to let it subside into clear visions
of the future. No hope! He could not pierce the war-smoke to any horizon
of better things. He who had schooled himself so unceasingly to feel with
utmost intensity the responsibility of each soul for any violence or crime
of others, could not cancel the fact of multitudinous murder by any
hypothesis of prospective benefit. Thus, in the midst of that magnificent
turbulence, he was like the central quiet of a whirlpool: all the fierce
currents met there, and seemed to pause,--but only seemed. Full of
sympathy as he was for his fellows, and agitated at times by the same
warlike impulses, he could not give himself rein as they did, nor dared
to raise any encouraging strain in his writing, as others felt that they
might freely do. His Puritan sense of justice, refined by descent and
wedded to mercy, compelled him to weigh all carefully, to debate long and
compassionately. But meantime the popular sense of justice--that same
New England sentiment, of which his own was a development--cared nothing
for these fine considerations, and Hawthorne was generally condemned by
it as being warped by his old Democratic alliances into what was called
treason. Nevertheless, he was glad to be in his native land, and suffer
bitter criticism here,--if that were all that could be granted,--rather
than to remain an unmolested exile.
An article which he contributed to the "Atlantic Monthly" in July, 1862,
gives a faint inkling of his state of mind at this time; but nothing
illustrates more clearly, either, the reserve which he always claimed
lay behind his seemingly most frank expressions in print. For he there
gives the idea of something like coldness in his attitude touching the
whole great tragedy. But those who saw him daily, and knew his real
mood, have remembered how deeply his heart was shaken by it.
Fortunately, there are one or two epistolary proofs of the degree in
which his sympathy with his own side of the struggle sometimes mastered
him. He used to say that he only regretted that his son was too young
and himself too old to admit of either of them entering the army; and
just after the first battle of Bull Run he wrote to Mr. Lowell, at
Cambridge, declining an invitation:--
THE WAYSIDE, CONCORD, July 23, 1861.
DEAR LOWELL:--I am to start, in two or three days, on an excursion
with----, who has something the matter with him, and seems to need
sea-air and change. If I alone were concerned, ... I would most gladly
put off my trip till after your dinner; but, as the case stands, I am
compelled to decline. Speaking of dinner, last evening's news will dull
the edge of many a Northern appetite; but if it puts all of us into the
same grim and bloody humor that it does me, the South had better have
suffered ten defeats than won this victory.
Sincerely yours,
NATH. HAWTHORNE.
And to another friend, in October:--
"For my part, I don't hope (nor, indeed, wish) to see the Union restored
as it was; amputation seems to me much the better plan.... I would fight
to the death for the Northern slave States, and let the rest go.... I
have not found it possible to occupy my mind with its usual trash and
nonsense during these anxious times; but as the autumn advances, I find
myself sitting down at my desk and blotting successive sheets of paper
as of yore."
He had now begun, I suppose, the "Romance of Immortality," or "Septimius
Felton," which has been posthumously printed, but had been abandoned by
him for another treatment of the same theme, called "The Dolliver
Romance." This last, of which two chapters appeared, was left unfinished
at his death. Of "Septimius" I shall not attempt an analysis: it
contains several related and concentric circles of meaning, to survey
which would require too much space. The subject had been one of the
earliest themes of meditation with Hawthorne, and he wrote as with a
fountain-pen in which was locked the fluid thought of a lifetime.
One of the less obvious aspects of the book is the typification
in Septimius's case of that endless struggle which is the lot of
every man inspired by an ideal aim. The poet and the painter are,
equally with Septimius, seekers after immortality, though of a more
ethereal kind; and his morbidness and exaggeration serve to excite in us
a tenderness and pity over him, assisting the reception of truth. These
relate mainly to the temptation of the artist to effect a severance of
ordinary, active human relations. (Sad to think what bitter cause the
author had to brood upon this, the fault attributed to himself!) The
poet, the creator in whatever art, must maintain his own circle of
serene air, shutting out from it the flat reverberations of common life;
but if he fail to live generously toward his fellows,--if he cannot make
the light of every day supply the nimbus in which he hopes to appear
shining to posterity,--then he will fall into the treacherous pit of
selfishness where Septimius's soul lies smothered. But this set of
meanings runs imperceptibly into others, for the book is much like the
cabalistic manuscript described in its pages: now it is blurred over
with deceptive sameness, and again it brims with multifarious beauties
like those that swim within the golden depth of Tieck's enchanted
goblet. The ultimate and most insistent moral is perhaps that which
brings it into comparison with Goethe's "Faust"; this, namely, that, in
order to defraud Nature of her dues, we must enter into compact with the
Devil. Both Faust and Septimius study magic in their separate ways, with
the hope of securing results denied to their kind by a common destiny;
but Faust proves infinitely the meaner of the two, since he desires only
to restore his youth, that he may engage in the mere mad joy of a lusty
existence for a few years, while Septimius seeks some mode, however
austere and cheerless, of prolonging his life through centuries of
world-wide beneficence. Yet the satanically refined egoism which lays
hold of Septimius is the same spirit incarnated in Goethe's
Mephistopheles,--_der Geist der stets verneint_. To Faust he denies
the existence of good in anything, primarily the good of that universal
knowledge to the acquisition of which he has devoted his life, but
through this scepticism mining his faith in all besides. To Septimius he
denies the worth of so brief a life as ours, and the good of living to
whatever end seems for the hour most needful and noble. Septimius might
perhaps be described as Faust at an earlier stage of development than
that in which Goethe represents him. [Footnote: Indeed, these words,
applied by Mephistopheles to Faust, suit Septimius equally well:--
"Ihm hat das Schicksal einen Geist gegeben
Der ungebändigt immer vorwarts dringt
Und dessen übereiltes Streben
Der Erde Freuden überspringt."]
As a further point of resemblance between the two cases, it may be
noticed that the false dreams of both are dispelled by the exorcising
touch of a woman. Both have fallen into error through perceiving only
half of the truth which has hovered glimmering before them; these errors
originate in the exclusively masculine mood, the asceticism, which has
prevailed in their minds. It will be observed that, in the first
relation of Rose to Septimius, Hawthorne takes pains to contrast with
this mood, delicately but strongly, the woman's gentle conservatism and
wisely practical tendency to be satisfied with life, which make her
influence so admirable a poising force to man. The subsequent alteration
of the situation, by which he makes her the half-sister of his hero, is
owing, as Mr. Higginson has pointed out, to the fact "that a heroine
must be supplied who corresponds to the idea in the lover's soul; like
Helena in the second part of Faust." [Footnote: A phase of character
rich in interest, but which I can only mention, in passing, is presented
in the person of Sybil Dacy, who here occupies very much the same place,
in some regards, as Roger Chillingworth in "The Scarlet Letter." The
movement of the story largely depends on a subtle scheme of revenge
undertaken by her, as that of "The Scarlet Letter" hangs upon the mode
of retribution sought by the physician; but her malice is directed,
characteristically, against the slayer of the young officer who had
despoiled her of her honor, and, again characteristically, she is unable
to consummate her plan, from the very tenderness of her feminine heart,
which leads her first to half sympathize with his dreams, then pity him
for the deceit she practised on him, and at last to rather love than
hate him.]
But there is a suitable difference between the working of the womanly
element in "Faust" and in Hawthorne's romance. In the former instance it
is through the gratification of his infernal desire that the hero is
awakened from his trance of error and restored to remorse; while
Septimius's failure to accomplish his intended destiny appears to be
owing to the inability of his aspiring nature to accommodate itself to
that code of "moral dietetics" which is to assist his strange project.
"Kiss no woman if her lips be red; look not upon her if she be very
fair," is the maxim taught him. "If thou love her, all is over, and thy
whole past and remaining labor and pains will be in vain." How pathetic
a situation this, how much more terrible than that of Faust, when he has
reached the turning-point in his career! A nature which could accept an
earthly immortality on these terms, for the sake of his fellows, must
indeed have been a hard and chilly one. But there is still too much of
the heart in it, to admit of being satisfied with so cruel an
abstraction. On the verge of success, as he supposes, with the
long-sought drink standing ready for his lips, Septimius nevertheless
seeks a companion. Half unawares, he has fallen in love with Sybil, and
thenceforth, though in a way he had not anticipated, "all is over." Yet,
saved from death by the poison in which he had hoped to find the spring
of endless life, his fate appears admirably fitting. There is no picture
of Mephisto hurrying him off to an apparently irrevocable doom. The
wrongs he has committed against himself, his friends, humanity,--these,
indeed, remain, and are remembered. He has undoubtedly fallen from his
first purity and earnestness, and must hereafter be content to live a
life of mere conventional comfort, full of mere conventional goodness,
conventional charities, in that substantial English home of his. Could
anything be more perfectly compensatory?
Nothing is more noticeable than the way in which, while so many
symbolisms spring up out of the story, the hero's half-crazed and
bewildered atmosphere is the one which we really accept, until the
reading is ended. By this means we are enabled to live through the whole
immortal future which he projects for himself, though he never in
reality achieves any of it. This forcing of the infinite into the
finite, we are again indebted to Mr. Higginson for emphasizing as "one
of the very greatest triumphs in all literature." "A hundred separate
tragedies," he says, "would be easier to depict than this which combines
so many in one."
But notice the growth of the romance in Hawthorne's mind. "Dr.
Heidegger's Experiment," in which several people are restored to youth
for an hour by a life-elixir, was published before 1837. In 1840 we have
this entry in the journal: "If a man were sure of living forever here,
he would not care about his offspring." A few years afterward, in "A
Virtuoso's Collection," the elixir vitae is introduced, "in an antique
sepulchral urn," but the narrator refuses to quaff it. "'No; I desire
not an earthly immortality,' said I. 'Were man to live longer on the
earth, the spiritual would die out of him.... There is a celestial
something within us, that requires, after a certain time, the atmosphere
of heaven to preserve it from ruin.'" But the revolt against death, and
then the reactionary meditation upon it, and final reverence for it,
must, from the circumstances of his youngest years, have been very early
familiar to Hawthorne; and in the course of these meditations, the
conception of deathlessness must often have floated before him. The
tradition as to the former owner of the Wayside, who had thought he
should never die (alluded to in the letter to Curtis, in 1852 [Footnote:
See ante, p. 244.]), brought it definitely home to him. He had in 1837
thought of this: "A person to spend all his life and splendid talents,
in trying to achieve something totally impossible,--as, to make a
conquest over nature"; but the knowledge of an actual person who had
expected to live forever gave the scattered elements coherence. The way
in which other suggestions came into the plan is exceedingly curious.
The idea of a bloody footstep appears in the Note-Books in 1850: "The
print in blood of a naked foot to be traced through the street of a
town." By a singular corroboration, he encountered five years afterward
in England an actual bloody footprint, or a mark held to be such, at
Smithell's Hall in Lancashire. ("English Note-Books," Vol. I. April 7,
and August 25, 1855.) The parting request of his hostess there was that
he "should write a ghost-story for her house," and he observes that "the
legend is a good one." Only five days after first hearing it he makes a
note thus: "In my Romance, the original emigrant to America may have
carried away with him a family secret, by which it was in his power, had
he so chosen, to have brought about the ruin of the family. This secret
he transmitted to his American progeny, by whom it is inherited
throughout all the intermediate generations. At last the hero of my
Romance comes to England, and finds that, by means of this secret, he
still has it in his power to procure the downfall of the family." This
clearly refers to something already rapidly taking shape in his mind,
and recalls at once the antique chest containing family papers, and the
estate in England waiting for an heir, of "Septimius." Could he have
already connected the two things, the bloody footstep and this
Anglo-American interest? The next piece of history comes in the shape of
a manuscript book in journal form, written in 1858, after Hawthorne had
left the consulate, and containing what must have been the earliest
sketch of the story, as he then conceived it. It begins abruptly, and
proceeds uncertainly, at the rate of a few pages each day, for about a
month. Detached passages of narration alternate with abstracts of the
proposed plot, and analysis of the characters. The chief interest seems
to lie in the project which a young American has formed, during a visit
to England, of tracing out and proving his inherited right to an old
manor-house formerly the property of his ancestors. This old hall
possesses the peculiarity of the bloody footstep, and with this some
mystery is connected, which the writer himself does not yet seem to have
discovered. He takes a characteristic pleasure in waiting for this
suggestive footstep to track the lurking interest of his story to its
lair, and lingers on the threshold of the tale, gazing upon it,
indulging himself with that tantalizing pleasure of vague anticipation
in which he hopes to envelop the good reader. The perusal of this
singular journal, in which the transactions recorded are but day-dreams,
is absorbing beyond description. But though at times he seems to be
rapidly approaching the heart of the story, yet at every point the
subtle darkness and coming terror of the theme seem to baffle the
author, and he retires, to await a more favorable moment. At its
conclusion, though he appears now to have formed a clear picture enough
of what his persons are to do, there is still wanting the underlying
thought, which he at moments dimly feels but cannot bring to light, and
without which he is unable to fuse the materials into readiness for the
mould.