"Come to Concord," wrote Ellery Channing to Hawthorne once upon a time;
"Emerson is away, and nobody here to bore you;"--which sentence contains
a gentle hint to the posterity of the two most distinguished men of
letters America has produced that even the mystic and the seer sometimes
palled upon the appetites of his personal friends. If any man could be
supposed to be a hero to his valet, that man was surely Emerson; but his
gifted neighbor seems not to have had any strong relish for his society.
Neither did Hawthorne really enjoy Thoreau, who would seem to have been
a sufficiently original person to have interested him, merely as a study
of character. But it does not appear that Hawthorne was ever
particularly fond of the society of men of letters, even though they
were also men of genius. He refused to go to the Saturday Club of
Authors, but would play cards with sea-captains in the smoking-room of
his boarding-house in Liverpool, evening after evening. Indeed, he liked
the piquant flavor of what is commonly called low society, when he
required any society outside his home, better than that which would have
seemed more adapted to his taste. We mean simply by this the society of
back-woodsmen, sailors, laborers, and old hard-headed farmers of New
England stock, with their strong provincial dialect.
Mr. Emerson himself liked the raciness of the conversation of such men,
and, indeed, we think almost all men of genius have something of the
same taste. When we read what Mrs. Hawthorne says of the manner of
conversation between her husband and Emerson, it can scarcely be
considered remarkable that Hawthorne should not have cared to confine
himself to the society of the sage. She says, speaking of Hawthorne:--
"Mr. Emerson delights in him; he talks to him all the time, and Mr.
Hawthorne looks answers. He seems to fascinate Emerson. Whenever he
comes to see him he takes him away, so that no one may interrupt
him in his close and dead-set attack upon his ear."
There is a one-sidedness to a conversation of this nature which might
well weary a person in the body; and only a disembodied spirit, it may
be surmised, could thoroughly enjoy it. A fine thing to do would be to
put two of those great conversationalists against each other, as was
sometimes done with Sydney Smith and Macaulay. It is said that the two
would sit glaring at each other and maintain perfect silence; whereas
either one of them apart from the other would discourse for three hours
without taking breath. Imagine the horrible agony of those among the
auditors who were not interested in the subject of the oration!--and
there must always have been some among the number so situated.
One remembers how Shelley got rid of the old woman down in Conway, and
wonders why the ruse was never tried upon Macaulay by some of his
victims. Shelley, it is said, was once riding in a stage in that region,
and the only passenger beside himself was an old woman with two huge
baskets filled with onions and cabbage respectively. She was huge
herself and much incumbered with fat, and the day was excessively warm.
Shelley was one of those delicate mortals who have been known to "die of
a rose in aromatic pains," and after a while the presence of the old
woman nearly drove him to distraction. He pretended that it had quite
done so, and suddenly throwing himself into the bottom of the stage he
glared at the old woman and shouted:--
"For God's sake let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,--
ALL MURDERED."
Before the last two words--which he rendered with more than an actor's
effect--were fairly out of his mouth, the old woman by her shrieks had
summoned the guard, and was released from the company of the madman.
Shelley was often induced by his friends to show them how he got rid of
the old woman, and the exhibition always called for uproarious applause.
There is a hint in it for any well-bred company who may be bored to the
point of extinction by a distinguished member. The only wonder is that
in some cases the sudden madness is not real rather than assumed.
Hawthorne was eminently capable of being bored to this point of
desperation, and his mother and elder sister saved themselves from any
danger of this kind by voluntarily living the lives of recluses. Julian
Hawthorne tells us:--
"His mother, a woman of fine gifts but extreme sensibility lost her
husband in her twenty-eighth year; and from an exaggerated, almost
Hindoo-like, construction of the law of seclusion which the public
taste of that day imposed upon widows, she withdrew entirely from
society and permitted the habit of solitude to grow upon her to
such a degree that she actually remained a strict hermit to the end
of her long life, or for more than forty years after Captain
Hawthorne's death. Such behavior on the mother's part could not
fail to have its effect upon the children. They had no opportunity
to know what social intercourse meant; their peculiarities and
eccentricities were at least negatively encouraged; they grew to
regard themselves as something apart from the general world. It is
saying much for the sanity and healthfulness of the minds of these
three children, that their loneliness distorted their
judgment--their perception of the relation of things--as little as
it did."
The sister is described as having in many respects an intellect as
commanding and penetrating as that of her brother, and yet she followed
in the way of her mother and passed her life in almost complete
seclusion, caring for nothing but the reading of books and the taking of
long walks, sleeping always until noon, and sitting up until two or
three o'clock in the morning in perfect solitude. She boarded for many
years after her mother's death at a farm-house on the seashore, and
could not be induced to come out, even to attend the funeral of her
brother at Concord, although he was her pride and idol throughout life.
Had Hawthorne himself been less fortunate in his marriage, there is
little doubt that his own peculiarities would have become exaggerated,
perhaps even to the extent of those of his sister. But he married a
woman who both understood and appreciated him, and whom he idolized.
From this union grew all the happiness and success of his life. His son
says:--
"To attempt to explain and describe his career without taking this
event into consideration would be like trying to imagine a sun
without heat or a day without a sun. Nothing seems less likely than
that he should have accomplished his work in literature
independently of her sympathy and companionship. Not that she
afforded him any direct and literal assistance in the composition
of his books and stories: her gifts were wholly unsuited to such
employment, and no one apprehended more keenly than she the
solitariness and uniqueness of his genius, insomuch that she would
have deemed it something not far removed from profanation to have
offered to advise or sway him in regard to his literary
productions. She believed in his inspiration, and her office was to
promote, as far as in her lay, the favorableness of the conditions
under which it should manifest itself."
It was to this that she devoted her life,--to comfort, to cheer, to
soothe, to inspire, to guard from all outward annoyances, the poetical
and sensitive man who believed in her so implicitly and leaned upon her
so confidently. They led a very quiet and secluded life during the most
of his literary career, and seemed almost to resent any intrusion of the
outside world upon them, not only as regarded persons, but even as
regarded agitating questions and pressing ideas.
They took very slight interest in the questions which stirred New
England life in their day, and held entirely aloof from the reforms
which shook the social life around them from centre to foundation-stone.
Indeed, he had a deep-seated dislike to the genus Reformer, and
presented his picture of the whole race in "Hollingsworth." Perhaps he
had known some individual reformer of that odious type, and out of this
grew his dislike of the whole species. At any rate, the men--of whom New
England was full at that time--who
"Blew the fiery breath of storm
Through the hoarse trumpet of Reform"
never received much aid or sympathy from Nathaniel Hawthorne or his
wife. Nor will they, apparently, from his son, who says of his father,
"He was not a teetotaler any more than he was an abolitionist or a
Thug."
But if their sympathies did not go out very widely to the outside world,
there was the most perfect sympathy and companionship in the home life,
and no more beautiful record of a perfect marriage has ever been made
than this life of the Hawthornes presents. Yes, it was a happy life they
led, these two in their married isolation, despite poverty and obscurity
and a lack of appreciation in the early time, and of trial, from
ill-health and other causes, in later years. He lived like Carlyle, a
good deal in the shadows of his famous books, and was sometimes for
months in the possession of the demon of composition. While composing
"The Marble Faun" he thus writes in a letter:
"I sternly shut myself up, and come to close grips with the romance
which I am trying to tear from my brain."
He was always discouraged about his work, and needed a deal of cheering
regarding it. He says in one place:
"My own individual taste is for an altogether different class of
books from what I write. If I were to meet with such books as mine
by another writer, I do not believe I should be able to get through
with them."