have ever had on this side of the water, and with such an artistic style
that one could hardly decide whether it was studied or natural. She was
a terrible antagonist; for she united the tongue of a woman to the
logical faculty of a man, and it was impossible to get the better of
her. Her faults were the faults of youth, as she was occasionally vain,
saucy or overbearing, and always self-conscious. It was this last trait
that Lowell referred to when he represented her as saying that since her
earliest years she had "lived cheek by jowl with the Infinite Soul."
Much youthful vanity, however, can be forgiven to those who are generous
and faithful. Besides, Margaret Fuller was splendidly domestic. She
advocated women's rights to a certain extent; but she was no forerunner
to the modern brood of platform women who fumble their night-keys while
they discourse on the duties of wives and mothers. She carried a helping
hand into the families that she entered, as well as stirring all the
inmates to an unwonted mental activity. She would knit socks while she
talked Plato: but the best testimony to her character is the character
of her friends. People are known by the company they keep.
The one quality which Hawthorne had in common with the
transcendentalists, except such qualities as are common to all good
people, was ideality. Next to the grand structure of his head, this is
the most noticeable characteristic in the pictures of him. He seems to
have been attracted to them at first, and was even mistaken for a
transcendentalist by Edgar A. Poe, and was attacked by that fiery
Virginian in a most belligerent manner.
At Brook Farm, however, he soon began to differentiate from them, and
finally acquired for them something like an aversion. Neither is this to
be wondered at. Hawthorne was an artist pure and simple. He looked for
ideality in human life; not in the ideas that control and direct it. He
was not like Raphael and Shakspeare, men who could enjoy philosophy and
make their art so much the richer and deeper for it. He saw everything
in a pictorial form; facts and conditions which did not make a picture
had no value for him, and reasoning was a weariness and a disagreeable
effort. Nevertheless he did the best he could.
It is delightful to think of the tremendous energy with which he worked
at Brook Farm. No one else seems to have done so much hard labor there.
He was better fitted for this than many of his colleagues, having a
strong, full-chested frame, and is said in his youth to have been a very
swift runner and skater; but nothing indicates better the latent force
that was in this quiet and usually inactive man. Many of the Brook Farm
adventurers were not physically equal to a solid day's work, but this
was a contingency which nobody had foreseen.
[Illustration: HAWTHORNE. AFTER AN ENGRAVING FROM THE PAINTING BY
C. G. THOMPSON.]
Hawthorne was one of the first to discover the futility of the
experiment. Early in the following year he wrote to Miss Sophia Peabody
to whom he was then engaged: "It has become quite evident to me that our
fortunes are not to be found in this place;" a conclusion which he no
doubt arrived at from an examination of the accounts of the association.
It was Hawthorne's salvation in the difficult path of life he had
chosen; a path as difficult and dangerous as that of an Alpine climber,
that, poet as he was, he always looked facts sternly in the face and did
not permit himself to be misled by romantic or sentimental illusions.
It had been expected that the more brilliant members of the community
would be able to write magazine articles, or other remunerative
literature, in their hours of leisure, and money thus obtained would go
into the common fund. Hawthorne found that he could do nothing of the
kind. Two or three hours' work in the sun did not quite deprive him of
the use of his brains, but it left him without either fancy or
imagination. He also felt the want of that external refinement which a
nature like Hawthorne's requires as a fulfilment of its internal
condition. The lack of nicety in the housekeeping became continually
more and more unpleasant to him. The expenditures at the end of the
first year were largely in excess of the receipts; in fact the inmates
had eaten up nearly everything that the farm produced. His friend
Franklin Pierce, who was just beginning to be prominent in politics,
asked him the salutary question, "What are you gaining by this peculiar
mode of life?"
His experience there served as a foundation for the "Blithedale
Romance," and caused no further injury than the loss of his money. It
would have required a Thackeray to have realized and described the
humorous side of it--the highly practical joke of so many well-educated
and cultivated people making life unnecessarily hard for themselves.
In the autumn of 1841 a reverend gentleman, the brother of Mrs. L. Maria
Child, went to visit his friend at Brook Farm accompanied by his niece,
who is one of the few persons now living who have a distinct memory of
the place. On calling at the "Hive" they learned that only a few members
of the association were present at that moment, but Mr. Ripley himself
could be found in the turnip field, where they soon discovered him with
two others, throwing turnips into a cart. On the approach of his
friends, Mr. Ripley came forward and said, "Dr. Francis, this is really
kind of you, to come such a distance to see an old fellow. You perceive
I am occupied with the philosophy of 'de cart.'" This referred to some
writings he had lately published on Descartes' philosophy, and made his
audience laugh heartily.
Mr. Dwight then appeared and gave an interesting account of a flock of
wild geese which he had discovered early in the morning marching through
the cornfield. He said they looked exactly like tame geese, but as soon
as he came in sight of them they flew away in a most surprising manner.
Mr. Bradford, who is frequently mentioned in Hawthorne's note-book,
looked sunburnt and very thin, and averred that milking the cows on a
frosty morning was a chilly kind of business. Hawthorne himself had gone
to Boston; probably to sell the pig referred to in his conversation with
Franklin Pierce. The visitors walked about the premises and were shown
through the "Hive," but found it rather a dreary and comfortless
building. The farm did not appear to be well kept. There was too
evidently a lack of order and discipline there; and without order and
discipline no enterprise in which numbers are concerned can succeed.
Having discovered nothing better than fool's gold at Brook Farm,
Hawthorne suddenly came across the true metal in the domestic privacy
of his married life at Concord. It would appear from one of Mrs.
Hawthorne's letters that George Ripley was so sanguine of the success of
his experiment that he had given Hawthorne a sort of guarantee for the
thousand dollars which the latter had invested in it. When, at the close
of the first year, Hawthorne had decided to withdraw from the
association, he naturally hoped to regain a portion of his capital. Mr.
Ripley was too deeply involved to accommodate him in that way, and
offered instead the rent of the old Ripley mansion in Concord, which
then happened to be vacant. So Hawthorne and Miss Peabody were happily
married, with no immediate fund save the rent of an ancient house in the
country, and no better expectations than the uncertain income from his
pen.
It was a hazardous undertaking, but he was now nearly forty years old,
his _fiancee_ more than thirty, nor could the sharpest foresight
discover any advantage from waiting longer. Emerson, in his lecture on
heroism, has signalled especially the heroism of the scholar, and
selected as an example the Frenchman Anquetil Duperron, who worked his
passage on a vessel to India, and then worked his way, mostly on foot,
through Afghanistan and Persia, learning languages as he went, in order
to obtain copies of the sacred books of the Persians, which were then
unknown in Europe. Were it not for fear of giving offence he might have
found a finer heroism in literary genius, and selected an example from
his own village.
For fifteen years Hawthorne had been like a ship detained from port by
adverse winds. The handsomest and most gifted man in America had nearly
reached to forty years without being married or finding a home of his
own. It was a life of hardship; of social starvation almost like exile.
It tested his courage, his faith in human nature, to the utmost. How
difficult were the earlier years of Irving and Bryant and Longfellow.
That he remained always true to himself and never lost sight of that
ideal of excellence which was his guiding-star.
We are not surprised to learn that his difficulties were rather
augmented than diminished by matrimony. Even in plain, rural Concord he
found at the end of three years, that his expenses had exceeded his
income by what seemed to him quite a formidable debt. This distressed
him the more because he had not yet learned that all men must lose in
some manner, and that the whole community is bound to take a share in
such losses as are honestly incurred. This is what charity and
philanthropy, as well as the various forms of insurance, finally result
in. But Hawthorne was the last man to apply such a principle to his own
case. He had continually hoped that when a balance-sheet was drawn up at
Brook Farm some portion of his investment there would be returned to
him; but this resource also failed him.
At last Bancroft the historian, whom James K. Polk strangely enough had
made secretary of the navy, heard of his situation, and had him
appointed collector of the port at Salem. He was again removed from that
position by President Taylor, and it has been said that his wife
heroically supported him by her skill in drawing and painting until the
"Scarlet Letter" could be finished and money procured from its
publication. The nomination of Franklin Pierce for the presidency was a
piece of good fortune for Hawthorne such as the wildest expectation
could never have imagined; and at length in his fiftieth year, with the
consulate of Liverpool, he finally saw the wolves driven from his door.
This realistic side of his life seems to have escaped the attention of
his biographers.
Yet he may be called fortunate to have lived when he did. It is easy to
say that we should have appreciated Emerson and Hawthorne better than
their cotemporaries appreciated them, but it is one thing to recognize a
genius when we meet him and a very different matter to admire him after
we have been informed that he is a famous man. It is doubtful if writers
in whom the ideality is so strongly marked would be received with favor
at the present time either by editors or the public. The tendency to
materialism would have been too strong for them. Lyceum lectures, on
which Emerson depended chiefly, are not what they were; and either of
them in a magazine would appear in too startling a contrast with the
smooth impersonal writing of to-day. The two cardinal sins of a writer
now are to have a style of his own and ideas of his own.
Complaint is frequently made that we have no great men like those of the
past; but such grand individualities as Hawthorne and Webster, or even
self-centred characters like Horace Greeley, are no longer possible.
Everywhere, in the college, in the market, and in society, war is waged
upon originality and independence of character. It is the same in
politics as in literature. Our novelist critic said of the rage for
Christmas cards, some years since, "The truth is that art must obey the
popular will or cease to be." There was not much art certainly in
Christmas cards; but nothing could express better the truculent spirit
of the age.
Most husbands are fortunate if their honeymoon lasts a month, but
Hawthorne's lasted two years. It would seem as if during that space not
a cloud came across his sky. He gathered flowers for his wife--water
lilies, which he must have sought for in a boat, fringed gentians and
the queenly "Lilium Canadensis"--and then felt that the most beautiful
of them were unequal to the loveliness of her nature. After the first
months, few visitors came to see them. "George Prescott," he says,
"sometimes enters our paradise to bring us the products of the soil, but
for weeks the snow in our avenue has been untrodden by any other guest."
Mrs. Hawthorne's letters at this period are exceedingly interesting, for
nowhere in her husband's writings, or in those of others, do we come so
close to this rare and remarkable man. The following description of his
character seems to have been a genuine case of thought transferrence, so
much is it like his own writing in grace and purity of expression:
"He loves power as little as any mortal I ever knew; and it is never a
question of private will between us, but of absolute right. His
conscience is too fine and high to permit him to be arbitrary. His will
is strong, but not to govern others. He is so simple, so transparent, so
just, so tender, so magnanimous, that my highest instinct could only
correspond to his will. I never knew such delicacy of nature."
This is a classic gem, and nothing could be added to it. The character
of Hilda in "The Marble Faun," is simply Mrs. Hawthorne at the age of
twenty-two. She was a pure-hearted, unselfish person, but not
self-reliant or over wise. There is a golden edge or rainbow hue to his
description of the old manse which distinguishes it from his other
writings and betrays the deeply penetrating happiness he felt there. It
is like a morning landscape painted while the dew is on the grass. One
notices especially his delight in the great yellow squash-blossoms and
the way in which he idealizes them. This, and the three years he spent
in Europe after the expiration of his consulate, were the holidays of
his life and the reward of all the rest.
With the exception of William Ellery Channing, he made no friends in
Concord, though he speaks kindly of Thoreau, and compares Channing to
him. It is to be suspected that this was largely on account of his
political principles--or the lack of them. He had held office under a
democratic administration and felt that his interests were connected
with that party. Further than that, he does not appear to have
distinguished between the two parties. Of his most intimate friends, one
was a democrat and the other a whig. But the annexation of Texas was now
in sight, and Concord was stirred again with the spirit of '75.
Hawthorne, as is well known, did not take interest in the antislavery
movement, and a heated discussion of any subject must have been jarring
and unpleasant to him.
It is not impossible that in this way he came into conflict with
Margaret Fuller and conceived an abiding dislike to her. Miss Fuller
would not have spared her eloquence in regard to what she considered a
matter of principle, nor is it likely that she would have been more
considerate of the respect which is due in such matters from a woman to
a man.
There were not a few persons whom she offended by too much "bounce." To
a reverend gentleman who asked her, as they were parting at the house of
a mutual friend, where her office was in Boston, she replied, "Oh! look
in the directory for it"; instead of politely giving him the street and
number. Thus she lost a pleasant acquaintance and a subscriber to "The
Dial." Hawthorne and his wife had not been four days in Concord before
she came to them with a proposition that they should take Ellery
Channing and his wife, who was her own sister, into their family as
boarders. One cannot help some astonishment at this proceeding, for it
is an instinct with all women to know that a newly married couple do not
like to be interfered with. No word has ever been published from which
we can infer how the grievance between them originated, but it is
morally certain that there was a grievance of some kind, and as
Hawthorne was the most inoffensive of men, it is not likely that he was
responsible for it.
Now in regard to what follows, it is well to carry in mind two important
points. In the first place, a writer of fiction acquires a habit, very
naturally, of dealing with all tales and anecdotes as if they were
subjects for his art, and is not therefore so accurate a judge of their
veracity as a lawyer or a critic might be. Whatever holds together as a
story is to him as good as true. The second point is that although
Hawthorne understood human nature better than the rest of us, it is
nevertheless with certain limitations. His romance characters are of a
rare sort and are well sustained, but they form a group by themselves.
He has not the range of Scott, Thackeray, or Goethe. There is not the
slightest evidence that he appreciated the character of Emerson; and if
so, he would not be likely to appreciate Emerson's intimate friends. A
man like John Brown, always ready to rush upon destruction for an idea,
must have been an inexplicable riddle to him. Yet John Brown was the
only American who could match Hawthorne in ideality--totally different
as they were in other respects.
Twelve years later, while Hawthorne was in Rome, he became acquainted
with a sculptor named Mosier, who gave him a most disparaging account of
Margaret Fuller's marriage to Count D'Ossoli. This informant said that
the D'Ossoli family, though pretending to be noble, actually lived like
peasants; that the count's brother had for some years been a servant to
a gentleman he knew of; that the count himself was an exceedingly
handsome man, but ignorant and clownish; that he could not even speak
Italian; and that Margaret Fuller had become a good deal demoralized in
Rome, and could neither write nor converse with her former brilliancy.
Hawthorne accepted this statement and entered it in his diary with
inferences of his own which are still more unfavorable to Miss Fuller.
We like to believe that he wrote this rather to relieve his own mind
than with the expectation of influencing the minds of others. We can
easily forgive him for it, for in the whole course of his life there is
no other instance of the same kind; but he was most certainly in error
to believe such an imputation on the character of a respectable lady
from the authority of a single witness. C. P. Cranch, the poet and
landscape-painter, says that this Mr. Mosier was the veriest Munchausen,
and nobody in Rome thought of crediting his stories. But Mosier's
statement shows on its face signs of internal weakness. When he says
that Count D'Ossoli in attempting to model a foot placed the big-toe on
the wrong side, he states what is altogether incredible, and discloses
his own splenetic humor. Neither is it more likely that Margaret Fuller
permitted him to examine her manuscripts so that she might obtain his
assistance in regard to their publication. Whatever may be said of her,
she was not a fool, and was better acquainted with both English and
American publishers than all the sculptors in Italy.
Miss Fuller's marriage was rather a peculiar one, but nothing is more
common than for a highly intellectual woman to select a mate who is a
decided contrast to her. Hawthorne has given us an example of this in
the romance of Monte Beni--the brilliant Miriam falling in love with
that Italian child of nature Donatello. Margaret Fuller was always
attracted strongly by personal beauty, and when she was a girl at school
she chose her favorites rather for that than for their mental
endowments. The handsome D'Ossoli was no doubt all the more interesting
to her because he belonged to a noble family which had come to
misfortune. Is it not better for us to look at the matter in this way?
Margaret Fuller's marriage, voyage, and final destruction against the
rocks of her native land, would form the subject for a magnificent poem.
How could it happen that Hawthorne deceived himself? Is it possible that
he was in the right, and men like Emerson, Ripley, and James Freeman
Clarke in the wrong? Why does he consider Miss Fuller to have had a
strong, coarse nature, and to have been morally unsound? Here we enter
into the deepest recesses of the author's nature.
Hawthorne was not wholly a fatalist, or he never could have conceived
the character of Donatello, but he was very largely so. A man for whom a
life of action is impossible, and who is thus unable to escape wholly
from his own shadow, naturally comes to look on any series of events as
an inevitable chain of cause and effect. He speaks somewhere of Byron's
virtues and vices as being so closely interwoven that he could not have
had one without the other, and if the objectionable passages in his
poetry were expurgated, the life and genius of it would go with them.
His story of "The Birth-mark" is an allegory of the same description. He
did not agree with Shakspeare, that the best men are moulded out of
faults, but believed that as we are in the beginning, so we remain
essentially till the end.
He says that whenever Margaret Fuller heard of a rare virtue, she wished
to possess it and adorn herself with it; so that she finally became a
sort of brilliant external patchwork, dazzling to the eye, but
internally quite different. There is a certain truth in this, but it is
not a whole truth; for there is Socrates--a compendium of all the
ancient virtues, consistent throughout, and who formed himself in the
manner Hawthorne describes. It is true that in a search after rare and
exceptional virtues we are apt to lose sight of the more homely kind
which form the bone and sinew of human-life. But is not this effort a
virtue in itself? Is not all progress in this world accomplished as the
frog escaped from the well, by jumping up three feet and falling back
two? Is not the very crown of character that which we derive from
failure, penitence, and self-reproach? Human nature is a mysterious
labyrinth and the wisest have only found a partial clue to it.
George S. Hillard--a brilliant amateur sort of writer, orator and
editor--came to visit Hawthorne one of the last Sundays while he
remained in the Old Manse, and the two went together to spend the
forenoon in Walden woods, calling on Emerson by the way to inquire what
the best road might be. Emerson prudently detained them until after the
townspeople were safely in their churches, and then accompanied them. It
is a pleasant retrospect to think of those two mighty men, so like and
yet so unlike, together with their amiable and gifted friend, going off
on this Sunday excursion. Mr. Hillard was a fortunate companion for him,
for no one could serve better as a mean between two extremes. At the
close of Hawthorne's rehearsal of this episode, he makes this note, in
commentary:--
"I find that my respect for clerical people, as such, and my faith in
the utility of their office, decrease daily. We certainly do need a new
Revelation, a new system; for there seems to be no life in the old one."
Was this the summary and net result of their stroll in Walden woods? It
must be confessed that such was the opinion of the most thoughtful and
high-minded people in those days; but we do not feel so now. Schism and
separation have done their work, and liberal thinkers everywhere are now
returning to the Christian fold.
* * * * *
About the first of June 1860 the Hawthorne family returned from their
long residence in England and Italy. There was no little curiosity
concerning them in the quiet old settlement, which was increased by the
fact that nothing was seen of them for several months after they came.
If Thoreau was a recluse, Hawthorne was an anchorite. He brought up his
children in such purity and simplicity as is scarcely credible,--not
altogether a wise plan. It was said that he did not even take a daily
paper. In the following year Martin F. Conway, the first United States
representative from Kansas, went to Concord to call on Emerson, and
Emerson invited Hawthorne to dine with them. Judge Conway afterwards
remarked that Mr. Hawthorne said very little during the dinner, and
whenever he spoke he blushed. Imagine a man five times as sensitive as a
young lady in her first season, with the will of a Titan, and a mind
like a crown-glass mirror, and you have Nathaniel Hawthorne. While he
was in a state of observation, the expression of his face reflected
everything that was going on about him; in his reflective moods, it was
like looking in at the window of a dark room, or perhaps a
picture-gallery; and if any accident disturbed him his look was
something like a cracked pane of glass.