not--after his college days--as a sportsman. While living beside the
Concord, he rowed frequently, with a dreamy devotion to the pastime, and
was fond of fishing; swimming, too, he enjoyed. But his chief exercise
was walking; he had a vast capacity for it, and was, I think, never even
seen upon horseback. At Brook Farm he "belabored the rugged furrows"
with a will; and at the Old Manse he presided over his garden in a
paradisiacal sort of way. Books in every form he was always eager for,
sometimes, as has been reported, satisfying himself with an old almanac
or newspaper, over which he would brood as deeply as over richly stored
volumes of classic literature. At other times he was fastidious in his
choice, and threw aside many books before he found the right one for the
hour. [Footnote: He would attach himself to a book or a poem apparently
by some law perceptible only to himself, perhaps often giving an
interest by his own genius. A poem On Solitude, in Dryden's Miscellany,
was at one time a special favorite with him.
It begins:--
"O Solitude, my sweetest choice,
Places devoted to the Night,
Remote from Tumult and from Noise,
How you my restless thoughts delight!"
And the last stanza has these lines:--
"O, how I solitude adore,
That element of noblest wit,
Where I have learned Apollo's lore,
Without the pains to study it."]
An impression has been set afloat that he cared nothing for books in
themselves, but this is incorrect. He never had the means to accumulate
a library of any size, but he had a passion for books.
"There yet lingers with me a superstitious reverence for literature of
all kinds," he writes in "The Old Manse." "A bound volume has a charm in
my eyes similar to what scraps of manuscript possess for the good
Mussulman; ... every new book or antique one may contain the 'open
sesame,'--the spell to disclose treasures hidden in some unsuspected
cave of Truth."
When he lived at the Wayside, and would occasionally bring home a small
package of books from Boston, these furnished him fresh pleasure for
many days. He would carry some favorite of them with him everywhere,
from room to room or to his hill-top. He was, as we have seen, a cordial
admirer of other writers, seldom vexing himself with a critical review
of their merits and defects, but applying to them instead the test of
his own catholic capacity for enjoyment. The deliberate tone in which he
judges his own works, in his letters, shows how little his mind was
impressed by the greatness of their fame and of the genius found in
them. There could not have been a more modest author, though he did not
weakly underrate his work. "Recognition," he once said to Mr. Howells,
"makes a man very modest."
An attempt has also been made to show that he had little interest in
animals, partly based, ludicrous as it may seem, on his bringing them
into only one of his books. In his American journals, however, there is
abundant evidence of his acute sympathy in this direction; at the Old
Manse he fried fish for his dog Leo, when he says he should not have
done it for himself; and in the Trosachs he finds a moment for pitying
some little lambs startled by the approach of his party. [Footnote:
English Note-Books (May, 1856).] I have already mentioned his fondness
for cats. It has further been said that he did not enjoy wild nature,
because in the "English Note-Books" there is no outgushing of ecstatic
description. But in fact he had the keenest enjoyment of it. He could
not enter into the spectacle when hurrying through strange regions.
Among the English lakes he writes:--
"To say the truth, I was weary of fine scenery, and it seemed to me
that I had eaten a score of mountains and quaffed as many lakes, all in
the space of two or three days, and the natural consequence was a
surfeit.
"I doubt if anybody ever does really see a mountain, who goes for the
set and sole purpose of seeing it. Nature will not let herself be seen
in such cases. You must patiently bide her time; and by and by, at some
unforeseen moment, she will quietly and suddenly unveil herself and for
a brief space allow you to look right into the heart of her mystery. But
if you call out to her peremptorily, 'Nature! unveil yourself this very
moment!' she only draws her veil the closer; and you may look with all
your eyes, and imagine that you see all that she can show, and yet see
nothing."
But this was because his sensibility was so great that he drew from
little things a larger pleasure than many feel when excited by grand
ones; and knowing this deeper phase, he could not be content with the
hasty admiration on which tourists flatter themselves. The beauty of a
scene which he could absorb in peace was never lost upon him. Every year
the recurrent changes of season filled him with untold pleasure; and in
the spring, Mrs. Hawthorne has been heard to say, he would walk with her
in continuous silence, his heart full of the awe and delight with which
the miracle of buds and new verdure inspired him. Nothing could be more
accurate or sensitive than the brief descriptions of nature in his
works. But there is nothing sentimental about them; partly owing to the
Anglo-Saxon instinct which caused him to seek precise and detailed
statement first of all, and partly because of a certain classic,
awe-inspired reserve, like that of Horace and Virgil.
There was a commendable indolence in his character. It was not a
constitutional weakness, overcoming will, but the instinctive precaution
of a man whose errand it was to rise to great emergencies of exertion.
He always waited for an adequate mood, before writing. But these
intervals, of course, were richly productive of revery which afterward
entered into the creative moments. He would sometimes become deeply
abstracted in imagination; and while he was writing "The Scarlet Letter"
it is related by a trustworthy person that, sitting in the room where
his wife was doing some sewing, he unconsciously took up a part of the
work and cut it into minute fragments with the scissors, without being
aware that he had done so. At some previous time, he had in the same way
gradually chipped off with a knife portions of a table, until the entire
folding-leaf was worn away by the process. The opinion was sometimes
advanced by him that without a certain mixture of uncongenial labor he
might not have done so much with the pen; but in this he perhaps
underestimated the leisure in his blood, which was one of the elements
of his power. Men of smaller calibre are hollowed out by the fire of
ideas, and decay too quickly; but this trait preserved him from such a
fate. Combined with his far-reaching foresight, it may have had
something to do with his comparative withdrawal from practical affairs
other than those which necessity connected him with. Of Holgrave he
writes:--
"His error lay in supposing that this age more than any past or future
one is destined to see the garments of antiquity exchanged for a new
suit, instead of gradually renewing themselves by patchwork; ... and
more than all, in fancying that it mattered anything to the great end in
view whether he himself should contend for it or against it."
The implied opinion of the author, here, is not that of a fatalist, but
of an optimist (if we must connect him with any "ism") who has a very
profound faith in Providence; not in any "special providence," but in
that operation of divine laws through unexpected agencies and
conflicting events, which is very gradually approximating human affairs
to a state of truthfulness. Hawthorne was one of the great believers of
his generation; but his faith expressed itself in the negative way of
showing how fragile are the ordinary objects of reverence in the world,
how subject the best of us are to the undermining influence of very
great sin; and, on the other hand, how many traits of good there are, by
consequence, even in the worst of us. This, however, is a mere skeleton
statement: the noblest element in his mood is that he believes with his
heart. A good interpreter has said that he _feels_ with his _brain_, and
_thinks_ with his _heart_, to show the completeness with which he
mingled the two elements in his meditations on existence. A warm, pure,
living sympathy pervaded all his analysis of mankind, without which that
analysis would have taken no hold upon us. It is a crude view which
reckons him to have been wanting in moral enthusiasm: he had not that
kind which can crush out sympathy with suffering, for the sake of
carrying out an idea. Perhaps in some cases this was a fault; but one
cannot dwell on the mistaken side of such a phase, when it possesses
another side so full of beneficent aid to humanity. And it must be
remembered that with all this susceptibility, he was not a suffering
poet, like Shelley, but distinctly an endurer. His moral enthusiasm was
deeper than that of any scheme or system.
His distaste for society has been declared to proceed from the fact
that, when he once became interested in people, he could no longer
chemically resolve them into material for romance. But this assumption
is also erroneous; for Hawthorne, if he felt it needful, could bring to
bear upon his best friends the same qualitative measuring skill that he
exercised on any one. I do not doubt that he knew where to place his
friends and acquaintance in the scale of relative excellence. All of us
who have not an equal analytic power with his own can at least reverence
his discretion so far as to believe that he had stand-points not open to
every one, from which he took views often more essentially just than if
he had assumed a more sweeping estimate. In other cases, where he
bestowed more friendship and confidence than the object of them
especially deserved, he no doubt sought the simple pleasure of accepting
what circumstances offered him. He was not a suspicious person;
although, in fear of being fooled by his fancy, he cultivated what he
often spoke of to a friend as "morose common-sense," deeming it a
desirable alloy. There was even, in many relations, an unquestioning
trust on his part; for he might well be called
"As the greatest only are,
In his simplicity sublime."
The connection between Pierce and himself involved too many
considerations to make it possible to pass them with indifference; and
he perhaps condemned certain public acts of the President, while feeling
it to be utter disloyalty to an old friend to discuss these mistakes
with any one. As to other slighter connections, it is very likely he did
not take the trouble that might have saved him from being imposed upon.
But it is impossible to define Hawthorne's personality precisely. A
poet's whole effort is to indirectly express this, by expressing the
effect of things upon him; and we may read much of Hawthorne in his
books, if we have the skill. But it is very clear that he put only a
part of himself into them; that part which best served the inexorable
law of his genius for treating life in a given light. For the rest, his
two chapters on "The Custom-House" and "The Old Manse" show us something
of his mode of taking daily affairs. But his real and inmost character
was a mystery even to himself, and this, because he felt so profoundly
the impossibility of sounding to the bottom any human heart. "A cloudy
veil stretches over the abyss of my nature," he writes, at one time. "I
have, however, no love of secrecy or darkness." At another time: "Lights
and shadows are continually flitting across my inward sky, and I know
neither whence they come nor whither they go; nor do I look too closely
into them." A mind so conscious as his of the slight reality of
appearances would be dissatisfied with the few tangible qualities which
are all of himself that a man can discern: at the same time he would
hesitate to probe the deeper self assiduously, for fear of turning his
searching gaze too intently within, and thus becoming morbid. In other
persons, however, he could perceive a contour, and pursue his study of
investigation from without inward,--a more healthy method. His
_instinctive_ knowledge of himself, being brought into play, would
of course aid him. Incidentally, then, something of himself comes to
light in his investigation of others. And it is perhaps this inability
to define their own natures, except by a roundabout method, which is the
creative impulse of all great novelists and dramatists. I doubt whether
many of the famous delineators of character could give us a very
distinct account of their own individualities; and if they did, it would
probably make them out the most uninteresting of beings. It would
certainly be divested of the special charm of their other writing.
Imagine Dickens clearly accounting for himself and his peculiar traits:
would he be able to excite even a smile? How much of his own delicious
personality could Thackeray have described without losing the zest of
his other portraitures? Hawthorne has given a kind of picture of himself
in Coverdale, and was sometimes called after that character by his
friends; but I suspect he has adroitly constructed Coverdale out of the
_appearance_ which he knew himself to make in the eyes of
associates. I do not mean that Hawthorne had not a very decisive
personality; for indeed he had. But the essence of the person cannot be
compressed into a few brief paragraphs, and must be slowly drawn in as a
pervasive elixir from his works, his letters, his note-books. In the
latter he has given as much definition of his interior self as we are
likely to get, for no one else can continue the broken jottings that he
has left, and extend them into outlines. We shall not greatly err if we
treat the hidden depths of his spirit with as much reverence as he
himself used in scrutinizing them. Curiously enough, many of those who
have studied this most careful and delicate of definers have embraced
the madness of attempting to bind him down in unhesitating, absolute
statements. He who mastered words so completely that he learned to
despise their obscurity, has been made the victim of easy epithets and a
few conventional phrases. But none can ever be said to know Hawthorne
who do not leave large allowances for the unknowable.
XII.
POE, IRVING, HAWTHORNE.
The names of Poe, Irving, and Hawthorne have been so often connected
without due discrimination, that it is imperative to consider here the
actual relation between the three men. Inquiry might naturally be roused
by the circumstance that, although Hawthorne has freely been likened to
Irving in some quarters, and in others to Poe, the latter two are never
supposed to hold anything in common. Indeed, they might aptly be cited
in illustration of the widely opposed tendencies already developed in
our brief national literature. Two things equal to the same thing are
equal to each other; and if Poe and Irving were each equal to Hawthorne,
there would be some similarity between them. But it is evident that they
are not like quantities; and we must conclude that they have been
unconsciously used by critics, in trying to find a unit of measure to
gauge the greatest of the triad with.
Undoubtedly there are resemblances in Hawthorne to both Poe and Irving.
Hawthorne and Irving represent a dignity and roundedness of diction
which is one of the old-fashioned merits in English writing; and because
they especially, among eminent authors of the century, have stood for
this quality, they have been supposed to stand close together. But
Irving's speech is not so much an organic part of his genius as a
preconceived method of expression which has a considerable share in
modifying his thought. It is rather a manner than a style. On the other
hand, it would be hard to find a style growing so naturally and strongly
out of elemental attributes as Hawthorne's, so deftly waiting upon the
slightest movement of idea, at once disclosing and lightly veiling the
informing thought,--like the most delicate sculptured marble drapery.
The radical differences of the two men were also obscured in the
beginning by the fact that Hawthorne did not for some time exhibit that
massive power of hewing out individual character which afterward had
full swing in his romances, and by a certain kinship of fancy in his
lighter efforts, with Irving's. "The Art of Book-Making" and "The
Mutability of Literature" are not far removed from some of Hawthorne's
conceits. And "The Vision of the Fountain" and "The Village Uncle" might
have issued in their soft meditativeness from Geoffrey Crayon's own
repertory, except that they are moulded with a so much more subtile art
than his, and with an instinct of proportion so much more sure. But even
in the earlier tales, taken all together, Hawthorne ranks higher than
Irving in the heraldry of genius: he has more quarterings in his shield.
Not only does he excel the other in brief essay, depending only on
endogenous forces, whereas Irving is always adorning his paragraphs with
that herb-o'-grace, quotation, but he also greatly surpasses him in the
construction of his stories; and finally, his psychological analysis and
symbolic imagination place him beyond rivalry. It is a brilliant
instance of the more ideal mind asserting its commanding power, by
admirable achievements in the inferior styles,--so that even in those he
was at once ranked with the most famous practiser of them,--and then
quietly reaching out and grasping a higher order of truths, which no one
had even thought of competing for. I suppose it is not assumed for a
moment that "Wolfert's Roost," the "Tales of a Traveller," the story of
"Rip Van Winkle," the "Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and the picturesque but
evanescent tales of "The Alhambra" can be brought into discussion on the
same terms with Hawthorne's romances, as works of art; and they
assuredly cannot be as studies of character, for of this they have next
to nothing. The only phases of character which Irving has any success in
dealing with are those of credulity and prejudice. The legendary
tendency of the two men has perhaps confused some readers. Both were
lovers of association, and turned naturally to the past for materials:
the New-Yorker found delightful sources of tradition or of ludicrous
invention in the past of that city, where his family held a
long-established and estimable footing; and the New-Englander, as we
have seen, drew also through the channel of descent from the dark tarn
of Puritan experience. But Irving turned his back upon everything else
when he entered the tapestried chamber of the past, while Hawthorne
sought that vantage-ground only to secure a more impressive view of
humanity. There is one gift of Irving's which won him an easier as well
as a wider triumph than that which awaited Hawthorne; and this is his
ability to take the simple story-teller's tone, devoid of double
meanings. Poe, also, had the passion for narrative in and for itself,
but in him it was disturbed by a diseased mind, and resulted in a horrid
fascination instead of cheerful attraction. Hawthorne, to be sure,
possessed the gift of the _raconteur_; but in general he was at
once seer and teller, and the higher exertions of his imagination were
always in the peculiarly symbolic atmosphere we are wont to associate
with him. Irving's contented disposition in this regard is certainly
very charming; there are often moods in which it is a great relief to
turn to it; and he has in so far the advantage over the other two. He
pitches for us the tone of average cultured minds in his time and
locality; and in reading him we have a comfortable sense of reality,
than which nothing in fiction is more reassuring. This is almost
entirely absent from the spell with which Hawthorne holds us; and here,
indeed, we touch the latter's most decided limitation as a writer of
fiction; for although his magnificently portrayed characters do not want
reality, an atmosphere of ghostliness surrounds them, warning us that we
must not look to find life there as we see it elsewhere. There is a
Northern legend of a man who lay down to sleep, and a thin smoke was
seen to issue from his nostrils, traverse the ground, cross a rivulet,
and journey on, finally returning to the place whence it came. When he
awoke, he described an imaginary excursion of his own, following exactly
the course which the smoke had taken. This indirect contact might
furnish a partially true type of Hawthorne's mysterious intercourse with
the world through his books.