In the list of contributors to the old "New England Magazine,"--of which
this is in a manner the legitimate successor,--among other names
afterward famous is that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, then an obscure writer
for various periodicals, and the ill-paid author of those juvenile
histories that gave Mr. S. G. Goodrich ("Peter Parley") a literary
reputation he scarcely earned.
The writer has a copy of this respectable and for a time popular
monthly, with which he would be reluctant to part. It contains, for the
first time printed, "The White Old Maid," one of the weirdest and most
fascinating of the "Twice-Told Tales."
My present object is to invite the notice of readers of the "New England
Magazine" of our day to the last completed work from the hand of that
man of marvellous genius,
"Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen,
And left the tale half told."
I remember with what concern I once heard a resident of Concord, a man
not unknown in the world of letters, speak of certain evils likely to
result from "Hawthorne's fall."
This, to me, conveyed only the idea of physical disaster, and it was
with a sentiment of relief, commensurate with the contempt inspired by
such an explanation, that I was given to understand that it was the
great author's unselfish effort in behalf of his old college comrade and
life-long friend, that was supposed to imply a state of moral declension
fitly indicated by the sinister word.
It was thus that men and women, full of the cheap patriotism of the
time, and puffed up with a sort of loyal egotism that blinded them to
the possibilities of honest purpose in any whose views on politics and
public affairs varied never so slightly from their accepted standard of
right, ventured to condemn what they were constitutionally incapable of
judging with either coolness or fair appreciation.
The "Life of Franklin Pierce" is by no means a great book, and neither
the subject nor its treatment entitles it to a place among the immortal
works that preceded and followed it; but to those of us who knew and
loved the writer, and to those who through his books got some glimpses
of the singular purity of his moral nature, a quality of friendship that
excludes the idea of selfish interest seems its author's only and
sufficient motive.
When the storm of civil war broke upon us, these worthy critics flung
themselves with tongue, or pen, or sword--chiefly with tongue--into the
good cause, and were scandalized at the vision of one who would fain
have dreamed while they, after their various methods, were fighting; of
a poet so far aloft in the regions of ideal fancy that the confused
voices of battle well-nigh failed to reach him. And yet, in the words of
one of their own writers,
"There was but one man living whom the country could so ill
afford to lose as this strange, wayward, fitful, unreasonable
poet and dreamer, who sneered at the war, and at the great
nation that waged it, with the pettishness of a spoiled child."
But the charge that Hawthorne sneered at the righteous war, or, far
worse, at his country, is full of an injustice which seems more bitter
because it comes from one whose hearty admiration of the AUTHOR should
have lifted him to a clearer appreciation of the MAN in his purity and
lofty patriotism.
The writer concludes the article from which I have quoted, and which, in
keen analysis and generous, literary judgment, is rarely equalled by any
of Hawthorne's reviewers, with these and like ill-considered words:--
"Wherever he turned his weary steps, there stood in his path
the genius of the time, not beautiful, not romantic, to his
eyes; not even grand--but stern enough and in grim earnest,
demanding of him what he could not give,--the heart and voice
of an American citizen in the hour of America's danger."
The writer forgot, or, blinded by strong feeling, failed to perceive,
that the silence which, with him as with hundreds of good and earnest
men, would indeed have indicated a fatal lack of patriotic emotion, was
in the case of Hawthorne only the inevitable shrinking of a rare and
sensitive spirit from contact with the awful realities of conflict.
When the "Artist of the Beautiful" descended from the serene atmosphere,
where his lofty spiritual nature had its true home and highest sphere of
action, and devoted his delicate gifts to the useful mysteries of
watch-making, the result, while eminently satisfactory to his old
employer and well-wisher, the jeweller, and doubtless of blessed effect
on the poor artist's purse, was disastrous in loss to the world of
thought, and in its influence on his better and real self.
A writer of tenderer sympathies and nicer discrimination, takes a more
kindly and a wiser view:--
"About the whole question of the war, Hawthorne's mind was, I
think, always hovering between two views. He sympathized with
it in principle; but its inevitable accessories--the bloodshed,
the bustle, and above all, perhaps, the bunkum which
accompanied it--were to him absolutely hateful.... To any one
who knew the man, the mere fact that Hawthorne should have been
able to make up his mind to the righteousness and expediency of
the war at all, is evidence of the strength of that popular
passion which drove the North and South into conflict."
But it was not Hawthorne's silence that provoked to fiercest expression
the safe zeal of certain literary loyalists. This last sketch from that
pen, the secret of whose magic was never communicated, and which,
precious in itself, is invaluable because the last, was published in the
summer of 1862--less than two years before its author's death. Its
title, "Chiefly about War Matters," suggests its character. It was, in
fact, a series of pictures of scenes in and about Washington at this
stage of the great contest.
The present writer attempts nothing here like a review of this
remarkable essay, entirely worthy as it was of its subject and its
author's genius; it is simply my purpose to call the reader's attention
to a production, which, more than anything else in Hawthorne's writings,
has kindled the hostile criticism of shallow and uncongenial minds.
So quaintly characteristic is its commencement that I am tempted to give
its opening paragraphs in full:--
"There is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically
scaled seclusion, except, possibly, that of the grave, into
which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate.
Of course, the general heart-quake of the country long ago
knocked at my cottage-door, and compelled me, reluctantly, to
suspend the contemplation of certain fantasies to which,
according to my harmless custom, I was endeavoring to give a
sufficiently lifelike aspect to admit of their figuring in a
romance. As I make no pretensions to statecraft or
soldiership, and could promote the common weal neither by valor
nor counsel, it seemed at first a pity that I should be
debarred from such unsubstantial business as I had contrived
for myself, since nothing more genuine was to be substituted
for it.
"But I magnanimously considered that there is a kind of treason
in inoculating one's self from the universal fear and sorrow,
and thinking one's idle thoughts in the dread time of civil
war; and could a man be so cold and hard-hearted, he would
better deserve to be sent to Fort Warren than many who have
found their way thither on the score of violent but misdirected
sympathies.
"I remember the touching rebuke administered by King Charles to
that rural squire, the echo of whose hunting-horn came to the
poor monarch's ear on the morning before a battle, where the
sovereignty and constitution of England were at stake. So I
gave myself up to reading newspapers, and listening to the
click of the telegraph, like other people, until after a great
many months of such pastime, it grew so abominably irksome that
I determined to look a little more closely at matters with my
own eyes."
It was in the early days of March that Hawthorne, in company with his
friend and publisher, Wm. D. Ticknor, left Boston on a visit to
Washington and the seat of war, then in its immediate vicinity.
The sketches of natural scenery are touched with the same pencil that
gave us the charming picture of daily life at the Old Manse.
It was in New York that the travellers had the first clear intimation of
the unnatural order of things consequent on a state of civil war. Here
they found a rather prominent display of military goods at the shop
windows--such as swords, with gilded scabbards and trappings,
epaulettes, carbines, revolvers, and sometimes a great iron cannon at
the edge of the pavement, as if Mars had dropped one of his
pocket-pistols there while hurrying to the field.
As railway companions, they had now and then a volunteer in his
French-gray great coat, returning from furlough, or a new-made officer
travelling to join his regiment in his new-made uniform, which was
perhaps all of the military character that he had about him; but proud
of his eagle buttons, and likely enough to, do them honor before the
gilt should be wholly dimmed.
The country, in short, so far as bustle and movement went, was more
quiet than in ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its
restless elements had been drawn towards the seat of conflict.
But the air was full of a vague disturbance.
The author's patriotic alarm seems to have been especially excited by
the host of embryo warriors that filled the cars and thronged the
stations all along the journey. One cause of this terror will seem to us
now all the more amusing because there are not wanting those who will
doubtless honestly believe that in giving it expression he wrote with
something of prophetic unction:--
"One terrible idea occurs in reference to this matter. Even
supposing the war should end to-morrow, and the army melt into
the mass of the population within the year, what an
incalculable preponderance will there be of military titles and
pretentions for at least half a century to come! Every country
neighborhood will have its general or two, its three or four
colonels, half a dozen majors, and captains without
end--besides noncommissioned officers and privates, more than
the recruiting officers ever knew of,--all with their campaign
stories which will become the staple of fireside talk
forevermore.
"Military merit, or rather, since that is not so readily
estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure of all
claims to civil distinction.
"One bullet-headed general will succeed another in the
presidential chair; and veterans will hold the offices at home
and abroad, and sit in Congress and the State Legislature, and
fill all the avenues of public life. And yet I do not speak of
this deprecatingly, since, very likely, it may substitute
something more real and genuine, instead of the many shams on
which men have heretofore founded their claims to public
regard; but it behooves civilians to consider their wretched
prospects in the future, and assume the military button before
it is too late."
The day of their arrival in Washington was the date of McClellan's
historic movement on Manassas:--
"On the very day of our arrival sixty thousand men had crossed
the Potomac on their march towards Manassas; and almost with
their first steps into the Virginia mud, the phantasmagory of a
countless host and impregnable ramparts, before which they had
so long remained quiescent, dissolved quite away.
"It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a
gigantic enemy, and, beholding him suddenly collapse, had
discovered to himself and the world that he had merely
punctured an enormously swollen bladder.
"There are instances of a similar character in old romances,
where great armies are long kept at bay by the arts of the
necromancers, who build airy towers and battlements, and
muster warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a defence of
seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the
besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost
foeman, and finds him melt away in the death-grapple. With such
heroic adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter
reckoned.
"The whole business, though connected with the destinies of a
nation, takes inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous.
"The vast preparation of men and warlike material,--the
majestic patience and docility,--with which the people waited
through those weary and dreary months,--the martial skill,
courage, and caution, with which our movement was ultimately
made,--and at last the shock with which we were brought
suddenly up against nothing at all!"
It is in dealing with ponderous and awful blunders like this that the
satiric power of the writer finds its favorite field of action.
It is not strange that, in those excited times of bitterness and strife,
certain genuine but shallow souls should have counted it little short of
treason to extract anything like fun from an episode which for us, in
the day of it, was full of very solemn mortification. In this sketch, as
indeed all through his works, it is in the delineation of individual
character--in the analysis of motives--that Hawthorne's peculiar and
amazing power is especially manifest, intermingled withal with a certain
droll self-distrust and deprecation of adverse criticism, to which he
has here given expression in a series of foot-notes, ostensibly from the
editor's pen, but written in fact by the author himself.
The mixture of candor and apologetic self-disapproval in these addenda
has a sufficiently odd effect, intermingled as it is with the utmost
freedom of comment and criticism.
Prominent generals, cabinet ministers, and even the President himself,
are dealt with in a vein of satiric candor, but with a pervasive spirit
of good-nature evident enough and of sufficient breadth to disarm even
official sensitiveness of anything like rancor.
Whatever personal descriptions the author may have meditated, or
accomplished and afterward suppressed, the only full-length portrait he
has given us is that of McClellan, of all the deeper interest and value
now that both these famous Americans are numbered with the dead.
His impressions of President Lincoln seemed colored with a trace of
prejudice, which, however unjust and unfortunate it may appear to us
now, was really only the inevitable consequence of the wide intellectual
gulf that yawned between those two men, both of positive character, and
with tastes and sympathies the most radically opposite. But despite this
unavoidable repulsion, Hawthorne's keen, resistless insight did not fail
to penetrate the wonderful purity and simplicity of Lincoln's character.
In a final word he does him ample justice:--
"He is evidently a man of keen faculties, and, what is still
more to the purpose, of powerful character.
"As to his integrity, the people have that intuition of it
which is never deceived. Before he actually entered upon his
great office, and for a considerable time afterwards, there is
no reason to suppose that he adequately estimated the gigantic
task about to be imposed upon him, or, at least, had any
distinct idea how it was to be managed; and I presume there may
have been more than one veteran politician to propose to
himself to take the power out of President Lincoln's hands into
his own, leaving our honest friend only the public
responsibility for the good or ill success of the career. The
extremely imperfect development of his statesmanly qualities at
that period may have justified such designs. But the President
is teachable by events, and has now spent a year in a very
arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind, capable of
much expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies and
activities than those of his early life; and if he came to
Washington a backwoods humorist, he has already transformed
himself into as good a statesman (to speak modestly) as his
prime minister."
So long as a general's sword is seemingly invincible, and the uniformity
of his success silences even the cavillings of envy,--that most
persistent of all the unlovely emotions,--just so long he may safely
count on a unanimity of public approval. But let disaster befall, and,
justly or otherwise, it matters little which, the voices just now most
vociferous for coronation, bellow the loudest for crucifixion! Few of
our commanders in the late war had bitterer evidence of this than
McClellan. Idolized while victorious, he was vituperated with
corresponding violence the instant fortune showed signs of wavering in
her fidelity. At this distance from those stirring times we can easily
perceive that the idolatry and the abuse were alike unjust and even
ridiculous; the same wisdom that pronounces it unsafe to praise a man
until death has set the seal to his earthly reputation, deems it no less
a folly to bestow adulation or excessive blame on a military commander
before the end of his campaigns. To his brief estimate of McClellan's
character and qualifications for his post of vast responsibility, our
author brought an admirable coolness of judgment, and that wonderful
insight into men and motives so seldom at fault. Keenly alive to the
ridiculousness of the attack on Manassas, and declaring that "no rebel
artillery has played upon us with such overwhelming effect," he was
capable, with a fairness sufficiently amazing in any critic of those
days, of doing full justice to the general's indubitable ability and
patriotism. He closes his sketch of McClellan, by no means the least
valuable part of the article we are considering, with this decided
expression of opinion: "I shall not give up my faith in his soldiership
until he is defeated, nor in his courage and integrity even then."
An odd peculiarity of Hawthorne's mind was the incertitude--I use this
vile word in lack of a better at the moment--that seemed at times to
invest his reasoning powers with a sort of Indian summer haziness.
This idiosyncrasy had a striking exemplification when our travellers met
"a party of contrabands escaping out of the mysterious depths of
Secessia."
"They were unlike the specimens of their race whom we are
accustomed to see at the North, and, in my judgment, were far
more agreeable.
"So rudely were they attired,--as if their garb had grown upon
them spontaneously,--so picturesquely natural in manners, and
wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity (which is quite
polished away from the Northern black man), that they seemed a
kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human, but
perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities
of olden times. I wonder if I shall excite anybody's wrath by
saying this?
"It is no great matter at all events. I felt most kindly
towards the poor fugitives, but knew not precisely what to wish
in their behalf, nor in the least how to help them. For the
sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not have
turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant on
their own account to hasten them forward to the strangers'
land; and I think my prevalent idea was that, whoever may be
benefited by the results of this war, it will not be the
present generation of negroes, the childhood of whose race has
now gone forever, and who must henceforth fight a hard battle
with the world on very unequal terms. On behalf of my own race,
I am glad, and can only hope that an inscrutable Providence
means good to both parties."
The whimsical feature in Hawthorne's character to which we have alluded,
is thus noticed by an intimate and valued friend of the great author:--
"Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet
the difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed
constantly upon his mind. He told me once that while he had
been consul at Liverpool a vessel arrived there with a number
of negro sailors, who had been brought from slave States, and
would, of course, be enslaved on their return. He fancied that
he ought to inform the men of the fact, but then he was stopped
by the reflection--who was to provide for them if they became
free? and, as he said with a sigh, 'While I was thinking, the
vessel sailed.' So I recollect, on the old battlefield of
Manassas, on which I strolled in company with Hawthorne,
meeting a batch of runaway slaves--weary, footsore, wretched,
and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine,
some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train
going northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me
with the remark, 'I am not sure that we were doing right, after
all. How can those poor beings find food and shelter away from
home?'
"Thus this ingrained and inherent doubt incapacitated him from
following any course vigorously.
"He thought on the whole that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd
Garrison and the abolitionists were in the right, but then he
was never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after
all; so that his advocacy of their cause was of a very
uncertain character."
There is a constant temptation to transcend proper limits in quoting
from this most characteristic production of our great author.
It was my purpose simply to recall to the minds of readers an article
whose authorship was scarcely known at the time of its appearance (in
the July of 1862), and which has never been included in its writer's
collected works.
Nothing in Hawthorne's books--not even excepting "Twice-Told Tales"--is
more suggestive and eloquent of the man and the author.
The same matchless purity of style, with never a sophomoric flight nor a
tinge of dulness; replete with subtle humor, and an irony whose
tempered edge scarcely wounds by reason of the attendant richness of
good nature that "steals away its sharpness"; as in the same soil that
nourishes the keen, aggressive nettle, is always found a certain herb of
healing potency. I cannot refrain from giving our readers some passages
near the close. They are descriptive of certain guests at Willard's
Hotel, in Washington, where the travellers lived during their stay at
the Capital.
This portion of Hawthorne's last magazine article recalls forcibly
passages in the first of his published stories, "The Gray Champion."
"It is curious to observe what antiquated figures and costumes
sometimes make their appearance at Willard's. You meet elderly
men with frilled shirt-fronts, for example, the fashion of
which adornment passed away from among the people of this world
half a century ago.
"It is as if one of Stuart's portraits were walking abroad.
"I see no way of accounting for this, except that the troubles
of the times, the impiety of traitors, and the peril of our
sacred Union and Constitution have disturbed in their honored
graves, some of the venerable fathers of the country, and
summoned them forth to protest against the meditated and
half-accomplished sacrilege.
"If it be so, their wonted fires are not altogether
extinguished in their ashes,--in their throats, I might rather
say,--for I beheld one of these excellent old men quaffing such
a horn of Bourbon whiskey as a toper of the present century
would be loath to venture upon.
"But, really, one would be glad to know where these strange
figures come from.
"It shows, at any rate, how many remote, decaying villages and
country neighborhoods of the North, and forest nooks of the
West, and old mansion houses in cities, are shaken by the
tremor of our native soil, so that men long hidden in
retirement put on the garments of their youth and hurry out to
inquire what is the matter.
"The old men whom we see here have generally more marked faces
than the young ones, and naturally enough; since it must be an
extraordinary vigor and venerability of life that can overcome
the rusty sloth of age, and keep the senior flexible enough to
take an interest in new things; whereas, hundreds of
commonplace young men come hither to stare with eyes of vacant
wonder, and with vague hopes of finding out what they are fit
for. And this war (we may say so much in its favor) has been
the means of discovering that important secret to not a few."
* * * * *
The writer remembers the vivid and untiring pleasure with which, when a
child, he read and re-read that marvellous book for little people,
"Grandfather's Arm Chair." It opened to him a new world of poetry and
beauty--a revelation which close and severest study of the great
author's mind and character, as developed in his maturer works, has but
made broader and deeper.
With a grateful memory of the first, I write these few lines to recall
almost the latest of Hawthorne's writings; the very last indeed, save
the charming fragment that gave to the world of letters "Little
Pansy"--"The sweetest child," says Alexander Smith, "in English
literature."
I cannot close this brief and cursory notice more appropriately than in
the words of a dear friend and appreciative admirer of our author, James
Russell Lowell:--
"This now 'sacred and happy spirit' was cruelly misunderstood
among men. There were those who would have taken him away from
his proper and peculiar sphere, in which he has done more for
the true fame of his country than any other man, and made him a
politician and reformer.
"Even the faithfulness of his friendships was turned into
reproach.
"Him in whom New England was embodied as never before, making a
part of every fibre of his soul, we have heard charged with
want of patriotism.
"There were certain things and certain men with whom his
essentially aristocratic nature could not sympathize, but he
was American to the core. Just after Bull Run he wrote to a
friend, 'If the event of this day has left the people of the
North in the same grim and bloody mood in which it has left me,
it will be a costly victory to the South.'
"But it is unworthy of this noble man to defend him from
imputations which never touched him. As the years go by, his
countrymen will grow more and more proud of him, more and more
satisfied that it is, after all, something considerable to be
only a genius."