"I bitterly detest this Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it adieu
forever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that
has ever happened to it from Nero's conflagration downward. In
fact, I wish the very site of it had been obliterated before I ever
saw it."
His complaints about his pens are really very amusing to those
people--and their name is legion--who have had a like difficulty in
pleasing themselves. He writes to Fields:--
"If you want me to write you a good novel, send me a good pen; not
a gold one, but one which will not get stiff and rheumatic the
moment I get attached to it. I never met with a good pen in my
life."
To this last sentiment we think that a great multitude which no man can
number will respond Amen. He says of them again:--
"Nobody ever suffered more from pens than I have, and I am glad
that my labor with the abominable little tool is drawing to a
close."
In private conversation he enlivened his more serious thoughts often
with vivid surprises of expression; and he had a mild way of making a
severe remark, which reminded Charlotte Cushman of a man she once saw
making such a disturbance in the gallery of a theatre that the play
could hardly proceed. Cries of "Throw him over!" arose from all parts of
the house, and the noise became furious. All was tumultuous chaos until
a sweet and gentle female voice was heard in the pit, when all grew
silent to hear:--
"No, I pray you, my friends, don't throw him over. I beg that you
will not throw him over, but--kill him where he is!"
It was only in the company of intimate personal friends, from whom all
restraint was removed, that Hawthorne ever indulged in his natural
buoyancy of spirits. Among them he occasionally condescended to
uproarious fun. But he was like Dr. Johnson, who, when indulging in a
scene of wild hilarity, suddenly exclaimed to his friends, as Beau
Brummel approached, "Let us be grave; here comes a fool." If there was
the slightest suspicion of there being a fool in the company Hawthorne
always wore his armor. The pretentious and transcendental fools he
hated worst of all; and the young man who had no taste for the finite,
but thought the infinite was the thing for him, always left him with a
feeling as of asphyxia.
Hawthorne's atmosphere was really unhealthy for transcendentalists. No
doubt his dislike of Margaret Fuller arose from this feeling of his that
she was always acting a part, always straining after an effect. He loved
simple, natural, unaffected people, and the part of a sibyl was very
distasteful to him. He suspected the inspiration of green tea in much
that Margaret said, and very ungallantly pronounced her a humbug. But as
he did this only upon the paper of his own private diary, with no
thought of it ever being paraded before a critical and captious world,
we should not blame him too severely. And if he was mistaken in what he
wrote concerning her husband and her life in Rome, as seems to be the
fact, no doubt he was deceived by gossip-loving friends in Rome
concerning the matter. One does not write gratuitous falsehoods upon the
pages of one's private notebook about acquaintances, as a general rule.
If he had desired to injure Margaret he would have put his supposed
facts in a different place, no doubt, and not merely written them in a
moment of spleen where he never expected them to be seen.
The publication of such comment as this, and Carlyle's mention of
Charles Lamb and others, seems to be due entirely to the total depravity
of literary executors. As George Eliot says, it is like uncovering the
dead Byron's club-foot, when he had been so sensitive about it through
life, as his friend Trelawny boasts that he did. Margaret Fuller was a
large-brained, big-hearted woman, but that she and Hawthorne could not
thoroughly fraternize is not a strange thing. We see another instance of
such lack of appreciation of each other's qualities in Henry James and
the Bostonians of the present time. Even the admirers of the Boston type
get a little quiet amusement from his delicious satire, although their
admiration of the reformers may remain unshaken. That the world has got
a little weary of the mutual admiration of the Boston coterie is an open
secret. We have had a trifle too much of it from the day of Fields, who
apparently invented Hawthorne, and would have put a patent upon him if
possible, down to the present era of worship of that real hero, Emerson
who, if he survives the laudations of his present army of admirers, may
well hope for immortality.
The wife of Hawthorne was so different a person from the noble army of
literary and artistic women who are so numerous to-day, but who in his
time had just begun to assert themselves, that, believing her to be the
perfect flower of womanhood, as he did, he could scarcely be expected to
appreciate the Zenobias of that or of the present time.
Mrs. Hawthorne's sister, Elizabeth Peabody, was one of the women of the
new era, and has spent her entire life in noble efforts to improve the
world into which she was born; and who shall say whether Mrs. Hawthorne
or Miss Peabody was the higher type of woman?
If we were obliged to compare Mrs. Hawthorne with the caricatures of the
strong-minded woman in which novelists so delight,--those "housekeepers
by the wrath of God,"--like Mrs. Jellaby and similar monstrosities, then
the answer would not be hard. We could all cry, Mrs. Hawthorne, now and
forever! But when we compare her to the strong-minded women like George
Eliot, perfect wives, perfect home-makers, perfectly sympathetic and
loyal comrades of their husbands, and lacking nothing of womanly
softness or tenderness with all their strength, then the answer is not
so simple. But doubtless the fact that God created both types may be
accepted as evidence that He saw uses for both, and that even the women
whom He made "fools to match the men" are not without their purpose in
the economy of the universe.
Such thoughts as the following in regard to her husband, written by Mrs.
Hawthorne after eight years of marriage, sound not unlike the
rhapsodies of George Eliot concerning Mr. Lewes:--
"He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to
do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to
him, any more than it is for a baby to be innocent. It is his
spontaneous act, and a baby is not more unconscious of its
innocence. I never knew such loftiness so simply borne. I have
never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household
matter any more than in the larger or more public ones. If the
Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere their wings are very
strong. Happy, happiest is the wife who can bear such and so
sincere testimony to her husband after eight years' intimate union.
Such a person can never lose the prestige which commands and
fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness, but in a
kind of blissful confusion live on. If I can only be so great, so
high, so noble, so sweet as he, in any phase of my being, I shall
be glad. I am not deluded nor mistaken, as the angels know now, and
as all my friends will know in open vision."
We will quote but this one passage from her letters about him, though
the Life is filled with similar ones, and will give but one of his
love-letters to her, and that not entire. He says:--
"Sometimes during my solitary life in our old Salem house it seemed
to me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive,
for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm. But at length you
were revealed to me in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own.
I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and
you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm, and
renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have
a heart; you only have thrown a light deep downward and upward into
my soul. You only have revealed me to myself, for without your aid
my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own
shadow--to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its
fantasies for my own real actions. . . . If the whole world stood
between us we must have met; if we had been born in different ages
we could not have been sundered!"
What was poverty and obscurity and isolation unto these two souls, so
complete in each other that nothing else was desired? How deep a lesson
might the young of these later days, who hesitate to take each other
unless all things else may be added unto them, learn from this perfect
marriage! How much, too, could they learn from the dignity and the
refinement and the charm of that early home, where all was so simple, so
humble, and yet so rich and satisfying! Would that we had more such
homes of royal poverty in these days of vulgar pretence and showy
unreality. More homes where there is no shamefacedness over the want of
the luxuries of their neighbors, but a simple content with what it is
possible to have honorably; where plain living is a religion, and where
there is no insatiable longing for the unattainable. The worship of
wealth, the feeling that there is no other good than money, is one of
the most degrading features of our modern life. It is a falsehood, too.
There is everything good in the world, and the most of the things which
are best in life can be had with but a little money. No man is poor
unless he feels poor. If a family are willing to live their own noble
life, pitched in a high key, and with little regard for what their
neighbors may say and think, it is still possible to be happy in this
goodly world, though the bank account may be small, or there be no bank
account in the case. The Ways and Means Committee of which Mrs.
Hawthorne was chairman in her day could impart a world of wisdom to the
fretful and ambitious wives of a generation of young men now upon the
stage of action, who strive so hard to live like the people who have
wealth at their command that they spoil the beautiful homes they might
enjoy by an unceasing strife to appear to live better than they can
afford to do.
When Fortune began to smile upon the Hawthornes, after the immortal
"Scarlet Letter" had been written and "The Blithedale Romance" had been
added to it, they received her favors with thankful hearts, and knew
how to spend wisely and well what came to them. But, as so often
happens, it does not appear that they were any happier in their easier
circumstances than in their poverty; probably not as happy, for the
glamour of youth was gone, and the first zest of being had become
dulled. Ill health, too, had come upon him, once so strong and perfect
in body; and their home was measurably broken up after they first went
abroad. The days at the Old Manse comprised the idyl of their lives.