foresaw that he could not outlive these trials. In April, 1862, he
visited Washington, and wrote the article "Chiefly about War Matters"
already alluded to. He has left this glimpse of himself at that time:--
"I stay here only while Leutze finishes a portrait, which I think will
be the best ever painted of the same unworthy subject. One charm it must
needs have,--an aspect of immortal jollity and well-to-do-ness; for
Leutze, when the sitting begins, gives me a first-rate cigar, and when
he sees me getting tired, he brings out a bottle of splendid champagne;
and we quaffed and smoked yesterday, in a blessed state of mutual
good-will, for three hours and a half, during which the picture made a
really miraculous progress. Leutze is the best of fellows."
The trip was taken to benefit his health, which had already begun to
give way; and though he wrote thus cheerily, he was by no means well. In
another published note there is this postscript:--
"My hair really is not so white as this photograph, which I enclose,
makes me. The sun seems to take an infernal pleasure in making me
venerable,--as if I were as old as himself."
He had already, as we know, begun to meditate upon "The Dolliver
Romance," trudging to and fro upon his hill-top, which was called, at
home, "the mount of vision." But before proceeding with that, he began
the series of essays composing "Our Old Home," not yet feeling strong
enough for the more trying exertion of fiction. But the preparation of
these, charming as they are, brought no exhilaration to his mind.
"I am delighted," he writes to his publisher, "at what you tell me
about the kind appreciation of my articles, for I feel rather gloomy
about them myself.... I cannot come to Boston to spend more than a day,
just at present. It would suit me better to come for a visit when the
spring of next year is a little advanced, and if you renew your
hospitable proposition then, I shall probably be glad to accept it;
though I have now been a hermit so long, that the thought affects me
somewhat as it would to invite a lobster or a crab to step out of his
shell."
His whole tone with regard to "Our Old Home" seems to have been one of
fatigue and discouragement. He had, besides, to deal with the harassing
question of the dedication to Franklin Pierce, which he solved in this
manly and admirable letter to his publisher:--
"I thank you for your note of the 15th instant, and have delayed my
reply thus long in order to ponder deeply on your advice, smoke cigars
over it, and see what it might be possible for me to do towards taking
it. I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw
either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. My long and intimate
personal relations with Pierce render the dedication altogether proper,
especially as regards this book, which would have had no existence
without his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his
name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that
an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of
pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have
deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out
the dedication, I should never look at the volume again without remorse
and shame. As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely
as I think fit to give it, or let it alone."
By this time, the energy requisite for carrying on the Romance had sunk
still lower, so that he wrote:--
"I can't tell you when to expect an instalment of the Romance, if ever.
There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to
be encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of
writing a sunshiny book."
And, a little later:--
"I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the
Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters
ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel
as if I should never carry it through."
His inability to work has been illustrated in the numerous bulletins of
this period published by Mr. Fields: they show him at times despondent,
as in the extracts above, then again in a state of semi-resolution. At
another time there is mixed presentiment and humor in his report.
"I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I
see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other
broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist
upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigor. That
trouble, perhaps, still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further
stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the present, lost its temper
and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better kept quiet.
Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor, if I wait quietly for it;
perhaps not."
But over all these last notes there hangs a melancholy shadow that makes
the flickering humor even sadder than the awesome conviction that he has
done with writing. How singular the mingled mood of that last letter, in
which he grimly jests upon the breaking-down of his literary faculty!
Here he announces, finally: "I hardly know what to say to the public
about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case
will be. I shall never finish it." Yet the cause was not so much the
loss of literary power, as the physical exhaustion that had already worn
him away beyond recovery. He longed for England; and possibly if he
could have gone thither, the voyage, the milder climate, and the sense
of rest that he would have felt there, might have restored him. He had
friends in this country, however, who made attempts to break up the
disastrous condition into which he had so unexpectedly come. In May of
1863, when "Our Old Home" was printing, he received from his friend Mr.
Lowell this most charming invitation to come to Cambridge:--
MY DEAR HAWTHORNE:--I hope you have not forgotten that during
"anniversary week" you were to make me a little anniversary by a visit?
I have been looking forward to it _ever_ so long. My plan is that
you come on Friday, so as to attend the election-meeting of our club,
and then stay over Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday, which is the last
day of my holidays. How will that do? I am glad to hear your book is
going through the press, and you will be nearer your proof-sheets here.
I have pencils of all colors for correcting in all moods of mind,--red
for sanguine moments when one thinks there is some use in writing at
all, blue for a modest depression, and black for times when one is
satisfied there is no longer an intelligent public nor one reader of
taste left in the world. You shall have a room to yourself, nearly as
high and quite as easy of access as your tower, and I pledge myself that
my crows, cat-birds, orioles, chimbley-swallows, and squirrels shall
present you with the freedom of their city in a hollow walnut, so soon
as you arrive.
Now will you write and say when you are to be expected? I assure you I
have looked forward to your coming as one of my chiefest spring
pleasures, ranking it with the advent of the birds.
Always cordially yours,
J. R. LOWELL.
"I have smoked a cigar over your kind invitation," wrote Hawthorne, in
answer, "and mean to come. There is a little bit of business weighing
upon me (literary business of course, an article for the magazine and
for my volume, which I ought to have begun and finished long ago), but I
hope to smash it in a day or two, and will meet you at the club on
Saturday. I shall have very great pleasure in the visit."
But, at the last moment, he was obliged to give it up, being detained by
a cold. And there seemed indeed a fatality which interfered with all
attempts to thwart the coming evil. At the beginning of April, 1864,
completely broken down, yet without apparent cause, he set out southward
with Mr. William Ticknor. On arriving at Philadelphia he began to
improve; but Mr. Ticknor's sudden death overthrew the little he had
gained, and caused him to sink still more. It is not my purpose here to
dwell upon the sad and unbeautiful details of a last illness: these
things would make but a harsh closing chord in the strain of meditation
on Hawthorne's life which we have been following out,--a life so
beautiful and noble that to surround its ending with the remembrance of
mere mortal ailment has in it something of coarseness. But it was
needful to show in what way this great spirit bowed beneath the weight
of its own sympathy with a national woe. Even when Dr. Holmes saw him in
Boston, though "his aspect, medically considered, was very unfavorable,"
and though "he spoke as if his work were done, and he should write no
more," still "there was no failing noticeable in his conversational
powers." "There was nothing in Mr. Hawthorne's aspect," wrote Dr.
Holmes, "that gave warning of so sudden an end as that which startled us
all." He passed on into the shadow as if of his own will; feeling that
his country lay in ruins, that the human lot carried with it more hate
and horror and sorrow than he could longer bear to look at;
welcoming--except as those dear to him were concerned--the prospect of
that death which he alone knew to be so near. It was on the 19th of May,
1864, that the news came from Plymouth, in New Hampshire,--whither he
had gone with Ex-President Pierce,--that Hawthorne was dead. Afterward,
it was recalled with a kind of awe that through many years of his life
Hawthorne had been in the habit, when trying a pen or idly scribbling at
any time, of writing the number sixty-four; as if the foreknowledge of
his death, which he showed in the final days, had already begun to
manifest itself in this indirect way long before. Indeed, he had himself
felt that the number was connected with his life in some fatal way. Five
days later he was carried to Sleepy Hollow, the beautiful cemetery where
he had been wont to walk among the pines, where once when living at the
Manse he had lain upon the grass talking to Margaret Fuller, when Mr.
Emerson came upon them, and smiled, and said the Muses were in the woods
that day.
A simple stone, with the single word "Hawthorne" cut upon it, was placed
above him. He had wished that there should be no monument. He liked
Wordsworth's grave at Grasmere, and had written, "It is pleasant to
think and know that he did not care for a stately monument." Longfellow
and Lowell and Holmes, Emerson and Louis Agassiz, and his friends
Pierce, and Hillard, with Ellery Channing, and other famous men,
assembled on that peaceful morning to take their places in the funeral
train. Some who had not known him in life came long distances to see
him, now, and ever afterward bore about with them the memory of his
aspect, strong and beautiful, in his last repose. The orchards were
blossoming; the roadside-banks were blue with violets, and the lilies of
the valley, which were Hawthorne's favorites among the flowers, had come
forth in quiet companies, to look their last on his face, so white and
quiet too. So, while the batteries that had murdered him roared sullenly
in the distant South, the rites of burial were fulfilled over the dead
poet. Like a clear voice beside the grave, as we look back and listen,
Longfellow's simple, penetrating chant returns upon the ear.
In vain to sum up, here, the loss unspeakable suffered in Hawthorne's
death; and no less vain the attempt to fix in a few words the
incalculable gain his life has left with us. When one remembers the
power that was unexhausted in him still, one is ready to impeach cold
Time and Fate for their treason to the fair prospect that lay before us
all, in the continuance of his career. We look upon these few great
works, that may be numbered on the fingers of a hand, and wonder what
good end was served by the silent shutting of those rich pages that had
just begun to open. We remember the tardy recognition that kept the
fountain of his spirit so long half concealed, and the necessities that
forced him to give ten of his best years to the sterile industry of
official duties. But there are great compensations. Without the youthful
period of hopes deferred, Hawthorne, as we have seen, would not have
been the unique force, the high, untrammelled thinker that he became
through that fortunate isolation; wanting the uncongenial contact of his
terms at Boston and Salem and Liverpool, it may be that he could not
have developed his genius with such balance of strength as it now shows;
and, finally, without the return to his native land, the national fibre
in him would have missed its crowning grace of conscientiousness. He
might in that case have written more books, but the very loss of these,
implying as it does his pure love of country, is an acquisition much
more positively valuable.
There is a fitness, too, in the abrupt breaking off of his activity, in
so far as it gives emphasis to that incompleteness of any verbal
statement of truth, which he was continually insisting upon with his
readers.
Hawthorne, it is true, expanded so constantly, that however many works
he might have produced, it seems unlikely that any one of them would
have failed to record some large movement in his growth; and therefore
it is perhaps to be regretted that his life could not have been made to
solely serve his genius, so that we might have had the whole sweep of
his imagination clearly exposed. As it is, he has not given us a large
variety of characters; and Hester, Zenobia, and Miriam bear a certain
general likeness one to another. Phoebe, however, is quite at the
opposite pole of womanhood; Hilda is as unlike any of them as it is easy
to conceive of her being; and Priscilla, again, is a feminine nature of
unique calibre, as weird but not so warm as Goethe's Mignon, and at the
same time a distinctly American type, in her nervous yet captivating
fragility. In Priscilla and Phoebe are embodied two widely opposed
classes of New England women. The male characters, with the exception of
Donatello and Hollingsworth, are not so remarkable as the feminine ones:
Coverdale and Kenyon come very close together, both being artistic and
both reflectors for the persons that surround them; and Dimmesdale is to
some extent the same character,--with the artistic escape closed upon
his passions, so that they turn within and ravage his heart,--arrested
and altered by Puritan influences. Chillingworth is perhaps too devilish
a shape of revenge to be discussed as a human individual. Septimius,
again, is distinct; and the characterization of Westervelt, in
"Blithedale," slight as it is, is very stimulating. Perhaps, after all,
what leads us to pronounce upon the whole fictitious company a stricture
of homogeneity is the fact that the author, though presenting us each
time with a set of persons sufficiently separate from his previous ones,
does not emphasize their differences with the same amount of external
description that we habitually depend upon from a novelist. The
similarity is more in the author's mode of presentation than in the
creations themselves.
This monotone in which all the personages of his dramas share is nearly
related with some special distinctions of his genius. He is so
fastidious in his desire for perfection, that he can scarcely permit his
actors to speak loosely or ungrammatically: though retaining their
essential individuality, they are endowed with the author's own
delightful power of expression. This outward phasis of his work
separates it at once from that of the simple novelist, and leads us to
consider the special applicability to it of the term "romance." He had
not the realistic tendency, as we usually understand that, but he
possessed the power to create a new species of fiction. For the kind of
romance that he has left us differs from all compositions previously so
called. It is not romance in the sense of D'Urfé's or Scudéri's; it is
very far from coming within the scope of Fielding's "romances"; and it
is entirely unconnected with the tales of the German Romantic school. It
is not the romance of sentiment; nor that of incident, adventure, and
character viewed under a worldly coloring: it has not the mystic and
melodramatic bent belonging to Tieck and Novalis and Fouqué. There are
two things which radically isolate it from all these. The first is its
quality of revived belief. Hawthorne, as has been urged already, is a
great believer, a man who has faith; his belief goes out toward what is
most beautiful, and this he finds only in moral truth. With him, poetry
and moral insight are sacredly and indivisibly wedded, and their progeny
is perfect beauty. This unsparingly conscientious pursuit of the highest
truth, this metaphysical instinct, found in conjunction with a varied
and tender appreciation of all forms of human or other life, is what
makes him so decidedly the representative of a wholly new order of
novelists. Belief, however, is, not what he has usually been credited
with, so much as incredulity. But the appearance of doubt is
superficial, and arises from his fondness for illuminating fine
but only half-perceptible traces of truth with the torch of
superstition. Speaking of the supernatural, he says in his English
journal: "It is remarkable that Scott should have felt interested in
such subjects, being such a worldly and earthly man as he was; but then,
indeed, almost all forms of popular superstition do clothe the ethereal
with earthly attributes, and so make it grossly perceptible." This
observation has a still greater value when applied to Hawthorne himself.
And out of this questioning belief and transmutation of superstition
into truth--for such is more exactly his method--proceeds also that
quality of value and rarity and awe-enriched significance, with which he
irradiates real life until it is sublimed to a delicate cloud-image of
the eternal verities.
If these things are limitations, they are also foundations of a vast
originality. Every greatness must have an outline. So that, although he
is removed from the list of novelists proper, although his spiritual
inspiration scares away a large class of sympathies, and although his
strictly New England atmosphere seems to chill and restrain his dramatic
fervor, sometimes to his disadvantage, these facts, on the other hand,
are so many trenches dug around him, fortifying his fair eminence.
Isolation and a certain degree of limitation, in some such sense as
this, belong peculiarly to American originality. But Hawthorne is the
embodiment of the youth of this country; and though he will doubtless
furnish inspiration to a long line of poets and novelists, it must be
hoped that they, likewise, will stand for other phases of its
development, to be illustrated in other ways. No tribute to Hawthorne is
less in accord with the biddings of his genius than that which would
merely make a school of followers.
It is too early to say what position Hawthorne will take in the
literature of the world; but as his influence gains the ascendant in
America, by prompting new and _un_-Hawthornesque originalities, it
is likely also that it will be made manifest in England, according to
some unspecifiable ratio. Not that any period is to be distinctly
colored by the peculiar dye in which his own pages are dipped; but the
renewed tradition of a highly organized yet simple style, and still more
the masculine tenderness and delicacy of thought and the fine adjustment
of aesthetic and ethical obligations, the omnipresent truthfulness which
he carries with him, may be expected to become a constituent part of
very many minds widely opposed among themselves. I believe there is no
fictionist who penetrates so far into individual consciences as
Hawthorne; that many persons will be found who derive a profoundly
religious aid from his unobtrusive but commanding sympathy. In the same
way, his sway over the literary mind is destined to be one of no
secondary degree. "Deeds are the offspring of words," says Heine;
"Goethe's pretty words are childless." Not so with Hawthorne's.
Hawthorne's repose is the acme of motion; and though turning on an axis
of conservatism, the radicalism of his mind is irresistible; he is one
of the most powerful because most unsuspected revolutionists of the
world. Therefore, not only is he an incalculable factor in private
character, but in addition his unnoticed leverage for the thought of the
age is prodigious. These great abilities, subsisting with a temper so
modest and unaffected, and never unhumanized by the abstract enthusiasm
for art, place him on a plane between Shakespere and Goethe. With the
universality of the first only just budding within his mind, he has not
so clear a response to all the varying tones of lusty human life, and
the individuality in his utterance amounts, at particular instants, to
constraint. With less erudition than Goethe, but also less of the
freezing pride of art, he is infinitely more humane, sympathetic, holy.
His creations are statuesquely moulded like Goethe's, but they have the
same quick music of heart-throbs that Shakespere's have. Hawthorne is at
the same moment ancient and modern, plastic and picturesque. Another
generation will see more of him than we do; different interpreters will
reveal other sides. As a powerful blow suddenly descending may leave the
surface it touches unmarked, and stamp its impress on the substance
beneath, so his presence will more distinctly appear among those farther
removed from him than we. A single mind may concentrate your vision upon
him in a particular way; but the covers of any book must perforce shut
out something of the whole, as the trees in a vista narrow the
landscape.
Look well at these leaves I lay before you; but having read them throw
the volume away, and contemplate the man himself.
APPENDIX I.
In May, 1870, an article was published in the "Portland Transcript,"
giving some of the facts connected with Hawthorne's sojourn in Maine, as
a boy. This called out a letter from Alexandria, Va., signed "W. S.,"
and purporting to come from a person who had lived at Raymond, in
boyhood, and had been a companion of Hawthorne's. He gave some little
reminiscences of that time, recalling the fact that Hawthorne had read
him some poetry founded on the Tarbox disaster, already
mentioned. [Footnote: See _ante_, p. 89.] Himself he described as
having gone to sea at twenty, and having been a wanderer ever since. In.
speaking of the date of the poetry, "We could not have been more than
ten years old," he said. This, of course, is a mistake, the accident
having happened in 1819, when Hawthorne was fourteen. And it is
tolerably certain that he did not even visit Raymond until he was
twelve.