Memories of Hawthorne Part 27

His jack-knife was a never-ending source of pleasure, and he was seldom without the impulse, if a good opportunity offered, to subject a sapling to it for a whistle, or to make some other amusing trifle, or to cut a bit of licorice with a slow, sure movement that made the black lump most acceptable.

His mind was never in a stound. It was either observing, or using observations. Of course he lost his way while walking, and destroyed commonplace things while musing; and the world hung just so much the less heavily upon his moving pinions of thought.

His diligence of mind is reported of him at an early age. His sister, Ebie Hawthorne, gave me a bust of John Wesley, in clerical white bib, and of a countenance much resembling Alcott's, even to the long, white, waving hair. Its very aspect cried out, though never so mercifully, "My sermon is endless!"

Aunt Ebie, hunching her shoulders in mirthful appreciation, said, "Nathaniel always hated it!"

Why not? At four years of age he had already had enough of Wesley; and my aunt, with a rejoicing laugh, described how, not being able to induce his elders to act upon his abhorrence of the melancholy, tinted object, at last, in dead of winter, he filled it with water through a hole in the pedestal, which had revealed its hollowness. He then stood the bust upside down against the wall in a cold place, confidently awaiting the freezing of the water, in which event it was to be hoped that the puppet sermonizer would burst, like a pitcher under similar odds. But John Wesley never burst, to the disgust of a broader mind and the offended wonder of childish eyes.

CHAPTER XVI

THE LEAVE-TAKING

A few words from a letter of Emerson's to my mother, written after my father's death, will give a true impression of the friendship which existed strongly between the two lovers of their race, who, though they did not have time to meet often, may be said to have been together through oneness of aim:--

CONCORD, 11th July [1864].

DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--Guests and visitors prevented me from writing you, last evening, to thank you for your note, and to say how much pleasure it gives me, that you find succor and refreshment in sources so pure and lofty. The very selection of his images proves Behman poet as well as saint, yet a saint first, and poet through sanct.i.ty. It is the true though severe test to put the Teacher to,--to try if his solitary lessons meet our case. And for these thoughts and experiences of which you speak, their very confines and approaches lift us out of the world. I have twice lately proposed to see you, and once was on my way, and unexpectedly prevented. I have had my own pain in the loss of your husband. He was always a mine of hope to me, and I promised myself a rich future in achieving at some day, when we should both be less engaged to tyrannical studies and habitudes, an unreserved intercourse with him. I thought I could well wait his time and mine for what was so well worth waiting. And as he always appeared to me superior to his own performances, I counted this yet untold force an insurance of a long life. Though sternly disappointed in the manner and working, I do not hold the guarantee less real. But I must use an early hour to come and see you to say more.

R. W. EMERSON.

If my father expected a full renewal of comradeship with American men of his own circle, and even the deeper pleasure of such friendship in a maturer prime alluded to by Emerson, circ.u.mstances sadly intervened.

The thunderstorm of the war was not the only cause of his retiring more into himself than he had done in Europe, although he felt that sorrow heavily. Or perhaps I might say with greater correctness that when he appeared, it was without the joyous air that he had lately displayed in England, among his particular friends, when his literary work was over for the time being after the finishing of "Monte Beni."

I remember that he often attended the dinners of the Sat.u.r.day Club. A bill of fare of one of the banquets, but belonging to an early date, 1852, read: "Tremont House. Paran Stevens, Proprietor. Dinner for Twelve Persons, at three o'clock." A superb menu follows, wherein canvas-back ducks and madeira testify to the satisfaction felt by the gentlemen whose names my father penciled in the order in which they sat; Mr. Emerson, Mr. Clough, Mr. Ellery Channing, Mr. Charles Sumner, Mr. Theodore Parker, Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Greenough, Mr.

Samuel Ward, and several others making the shining list. His keen care for the health of his forces induced him to hold back from visits even to his best friends, if he were very deeply at work, or paying more rapidly than usual from his capital of physical strength, which had now begun to sink. Lowell tried to fascinate him out of seclusion, in the frisky letter given in "A Study of Hawthorne;" but very likely did not gain his point, since Longfellow and others had infrequent success in similar attempts.

I chanced to discover the impression my father made upon Dr. Holmes, as we sat beside each other at a dinner given by the Papyrus Club of Boston more than fifteen years ago, on ladies' night. That same evening I dashed down a verbatim account of part of our conversation, which I will insert here.

He pa.s.sed his card over to my goblet, and took mine. "That is the simplest way, is it not?" he asked.

"I was just going to introduce myself," said I. Then Mrs. Elizabeth Stoddard sat down by me, and I turned to speak with her.

In a moment Dr. Holmes held my card forward again. "Now let me see!"

he said.

"And you don't know who I am, yet?" I asked.

He smiled, gazed at the card through his eyegla.s.ses, and leaned towards me hesitatingly. "And what _was_ your name?" he ventured.

"Rose Hawthorne."

He started, and beamed. "There!--I _thought_--but you understand how--if I had made a mistake--Could anything have been worse if you had _not_ been? I was looking, you know, for the resemblance. Some look I seemed to discover, but "----

"The complexion," I helped him by interrupting, "is entirely different."

He went on: "I was--no, I cannot say I was intimate with your father, as others may have been; and yet a very delightful kind of intercourse existed between us. I did not see him often; but when I did, I had no difficulty in making him converse with me. My intercourse with your mother was also of a very gratifying nature." To this I earnestly replied respecting the admiration of my parents for him. "I delighted in suggesting a train of thought to your father,"

Dr. Holmes ran on, in his exquisitely cultured way, and with the _esprit_ which has surprised us all by its loveliness. "Perhaps he would not answer for some time. Sometimes it was a long while before the answer came, like an echo; but it was sure to come. It was as if the high mountain range, you know!--_The house-wall there_ would have rapped out a speedy, babbling response at once; but _the mountain_!--I not long ago was visiting the Custom House at Salem, the place in which your father discovered those mysterious records that unfolded into 'The Scarlet Letter.' Ah, how suddenly and easily genius renders the spot rare and full of a great and new virtue (however ordinary and bare in reality) when _it_ has looked and dwelt! A light falls upon the place not of land or sea! How much he did for Salem! Oh, the purple light, the soft haze, that now rests upon our glaring New England! He has _done_ it, and it will never be harsh country again.

How perfectly he understood Salem!"

"Salem is certainly very remarkable," I responded.

"Yes, certainly so," he agreed. "Strange folk! Salem had a type of itself in its very harbor. The ship America, at Downer's wharf, grew old and went to pieces in that one spot, through years. Bit by bit it fell to atoms, but never ceded itself to the new era. So with Salem, precisely. It is the most delightful place to visit for this reason, because it so carefully retains the spirit of the past; and 'The House of the Seven Gables'!" Dr. Holmes smiled, well knowing the intangibility of that house.

Said I: "The people are rich in extraordinary oddities. At every turn a stranger is astonished by some intense characteristic. One feels strongly its different atmosphere."

"And their very surroundings bear them out!" Dr. Holmes cried, vivacious in movement and glance as a boy. "Where else are the little door-yards that hold their glint of sunlight so tenaciously, like the still light of wine in a gla.s.s? Year after year it is ever there, the golden square of precious sunbeams, held on the palm of the jealous garden-patch, as we would hold the vial of radiant wine in our hand!

Do you know?" He so forcibly appealed to my ability to follow his thought that I seemed to know anything he wished. "I hope I shall not be doing wrong," he continued,--"I hope not,--in asking if you have any preference among your father's books; supposing you read them, which I believe is by no means always the case with the children of authors."

"I am surprised by that remark. After the age of fifteen, when I read all my father's writings except 'The Scarlet Letter,' which I was told to reserve till I was eighteen, I did not study his books thoroughly till several years ago, in order to cherish the enjoyment of fresh effects,--except 'The Marble Faun,' which I think I prefer."

He answered: "I feel that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the greatest. It will be, it seems to me, the one upon which his future renown will rest."

I admitted that I also considered it the greatest. In the above conversation I was entranced by what I have experienced often: the praise of my father's personality or work (in many cases by people who have never met him) is not only the courtesy that might be thought decorous towards a member of his family, or the bright zest of a student of literature, but also the glowing ardor of a creature feeling itself a part of him in spirit; one who longs for the human sweetness of the grasp of his hand; who longs to hear him speak, to meet his fellowship, but finds the limit reached in saying, at a distance of time and s.p.a.ce, "I love him!" I have lowered my eyes before the emotion to be observed in the faces of some of his readers who were trying to reach him through a spoken word of eagerness. Very few have seen him, but how glad I am to cross their paths! Dr.

Holmes's warmth of enthusiasm was so radiant that it could not be forgotten. It lit every word with the magic of the pa.s.sion we feel for what is perfect, unique, and beyond our actual possession, now and forever.

Towards the last an unacknowledged fear took hold of my mother's consciousness, so that she gave every evidence of foretelling my father's death without once presenting the possibility to herself.

This little note of mine, dated April 4, 1864, six weeks before he died, shows the truth:--

"I am so glad that you are getting on so well; but for your own sake I think you had better stay somewhere till you get entirely well. Mamma thought from the last letter from Mr. Ticknor that you were not so well; but Julian explained to her that, as Mr. Ticknor said in every line that you were better, he did not see how it could possibly be. I do not either."

From the first year of our return to America letters and visitors from abroad had interrupted the sense of utter quiet; and many friends called in amiable pilgrimage. But a week of monotony is immensely long, and a few hours of zest are provokingly short. Nature and seclusion are welcome when, at our option, we can bid them good-by.

All England is refreshing with the nearness of London. In the rush of cares and interruptions which we suppose will kill the opportunity, while we half lose ourselves and our intellectual threads of speculation, the flowers of inspiration suddenly blow, the gems flash color. This is a pleasant, but not always an essential satisfaction; yet, in my father's case, I think his life suffered with peculiar severity from the sudden clashing aside of manly interests which he had already denied to himself, or which circ.u.mstances had denied to him, with the utmost persistence ever known in so perceptive a genius.

He undoubtedly had a large store of inherited experiences to draw upon; he was richly endowed with these, and could sit and walk alone, year after year (except for occasional warm reunions with friends of the cleanest joviality), and feel the intercourse with the world, of his ancestors, stirring in his veins. He tells us that this was ghostly pastime; but it is an inheritance that makes a man well equipped and self-sustained, for all that. When too late, the great men about him realized that they had estimated his presence very cheaply, considering his worth. Should he frequently have sought them out, and asked if they were inclined to spare a chat to Hawthorne; or should they have insisted upon strengthening their greatness from his inimitably pure and unerring perception and his never weary imagination? It is impossible to ignore the superiority of his simplicity of truth over the often labored searchings for it of the men and women he knew, whose very diction shows the straining after effect, the desire to enchant themselves with their own minds, which is the bane of intellect, or else the uneasy skip and jump of a wit that dares not keep still. As time ripens, these things are more and more apparent to all, as they were to him. In a manner similar to Emerson's, who spoke of his regret for losing the chance of a.s.sociating fully with my father, Longfellow wrote to my mother:--

CAMBRIDGE, June 23, 1864.

DEAR MRS. HAWTHORNE,--I have long been wishing to write to you, to thank you for your kind remembrance, in sending me the volume of Goldsmith, but I have not had the heart to do it. There are some things that one cannot say; and I hardly need tell you how much I value your gift, and how often I shall look at the familiar name on the blank leaf--a name which, more than any other, links me to my youth.

I have written a few lines trying to express the impressions of May 23, and I venture to send you a copy of them. I had rather no one should see them but yourself; as I have also sent them to Mr. Fields for the "Atlantic." I feel how imperfect and inadequate they are; but I trust you will pardon their deficiencies for the love I bear his memory. More than ever I now regret that I postponed from day to day coming to see you in Concord, and that at last I should have seen your house only on the outside! With deepest sympathy, Yours truly,

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.

To go back to our Concord amus.e.m.e.nts. Mr. Bright caroled out a greeting not very long after our return:--

WEST DERBY, September 8, 1860.

MY DEAR MR. HAWTHORNE,--Of course not!--I knew you 'd never write to me, though you declared you would. Probably by this time you've forgotten us all, and sent us off into mistland with Miriam and Donatello; possibly all England looks by this time nothing but mistland, and you believe only in Concord and its white houses, and the asters on the hill behind your house, and the pumpkins in the valley below. Well, at any rate I have not forgotten you or yours; and I feel that, now you have left us, a pleasure has slipped out of our grasp. Do you remember all our talks in that odious office of yours; my visits to Rock-ferry; my one visit, all in the snow, to Southport; our excursions into Wales, and through the London streets, and to Rugby and to Cambridge; and how you plucked the laurel at Addison's Bilton, and found the skeleton in Dr. Williams's library; and lost your umbrella in those dark rooms in Trinity; and dined at Richmond, and saw the old lady looking like a maid of honor of Queen Charlotte's time; and chatted at the Cosmopolitan; and heard Tom Hughes sing the "Tight Little Island;" and--But really I must stop, and can only trust that now at last you will be convinced of my existence, and remember your promise, and write me a good long letter about everything and everybody. "The Marble Faun" [ma.n.u.script] is now in process of binding. The photograph came just as I had begun to despair of it, and I lost not a moment in putting the precious ma.n.u.script into my binder's hands. I've been for a week's holiday at Tryston, and met several friends of yours: Mr. and Mrs. Tom Hughes, Mrs. and Miss Procter, Mrs. Milnes. The latter spoke most affectionately about you.

And so did Mrs. Ainsworth, whom I met two days ago. But she says you promised to write her the story of the b.l.o.o.d.y Footstep ["The Ancestral Footstep "], and have never done it. I'm very fond of Mrs. Ainsworth; she talks such good nonsense. She told us gravely, the other day, that the Druses were much more interesting than the Maronites, because they sounded like Drusus and Rome, whereas the Maronites were only like marrons glaces, etc. The H----s are at Norris Green. Mrs. H. is becoming "devout," and will go to church on Wednesdays and Fridays. I want news from your side. What is Longfellow about? Tell me about "Leaves of Gra.s.s," which I saw at Milnes's. Who and what is the author; and who buy and who read the audacious (I use mildest epithet) book? I must now bring this letter to an end. Emerson will have forgotten so humble a person as I am; but I can't forget the pleasant day I spent with him. Ask Longfellow to come over here very soon.

And for yourself, ever believe me most heartily yours,

H. A. BRIGHT.

He writes to my mother, "Thank you for the precious autograph letters, and the signatures of the various generals in your war. . . . What a pleasant account you give of Julian. Remember me to him. What a big fellow he has become, and formidable. I sincerely hope he 's given up his old wish to 'kill an Englishman, some day!' Don't forget us all, for we think of all of you." He speaks of my father's friendship as "the proudest treasure of my life."