The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne Part 11

Margaret Fuller was first on the ground, and Hawthorne found her seated on the hill-side--his gravestone now overlooks the spot--reading a book with a peculiar name, which he "did not understand, and could not afterward recollect." Such a description could only apply to Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," the original fountain-head and gospel of Transcendentalism.

It does not appear that Nathaniel Hawthorne ever studied "The Critique of Pure Reason." His mind was wholly of the artistic order,--the most perfect type of an artist, one might say, living at that time,--and a scientific a.n.a.lysis of the mental faculties would have been as distasteful to him as the dissection of a human body. History, biography, fiction, did not appear to him as a logical chain of cause and effect, but as a succession of pictures ill.u.s.trating an ideal determination of the human race. He could not even look at a group of turkeys without seeing a dramatic situation in them. In addition to this, as a true artist, he was possessed of a strong dislike for everything eccentric and abnormal; he wished for symmetry in all things, and above all in human actions; and those restless, unbalanced spirits, who attached themselves to the transcendental movement and the anti-slavery cause, were particularly objectionable to him. It has been rightly affirmed that no revolutionary movement could be carried through without the support of that ill-regulated cla.s.s of persons who are always seeking they know not what, and they have their value in the community, like the rest of us; but Hawthorne was not a revolutionary character, and to his mind they appeared like so many obstacles to the peaceable enjoyment of life. His motto was, "Live and let live." There are pa.s.sages in his Concord diary in which he refers to the itinerant transcendentalist in no very sympathetic manner.

His experience at Brook Farm may have helped to deepen this feeling.

There is no necessary connection between such an idyllic-socialistic experiment and a belief in the direct perception of a great First Clause; but Brook Farm was popularly supposed at that time to be an emanation of Transcendentalism, and is still largely so considered. He was wearied at Brook Farm by the philosophical discussions of George Ripley and his friends, and took to walking in the country lanes, where he could contemplate and philosophize in his own fashion,--which after all proved to be more fruitful than theirs. Having exchanged his interest in the West Roxbury a.s.sociation for the Old Manse at Concord (truly a poetic bargain), he wrote the most keenly humorous of his shorter sketches, his "The Celestial Railroad," and in it represented the dismal cavern where Bunyan located the two great enemies of true religion, the Pope and the Pagan, as now occupied by a German giant, the Transcendentalist, who "makes it his business to seize upon honest travellers and fat them for his table with plentiful meals of smoke, mist, moonshine, raw potatoes, and sawdust."

That Transcendentalism was largely a.s.sociated in Hawthorne's mind with the unnecessary discomforts and hardships of his West Roxbury life is evident from a remark which he lets fall in "The Virtuoso's Collection."

The Virtuoso calls his attention to the seven-league boots of childhood mythology, and Hawthorne replies, "I could show you quite as curious a pair of cowhide boots at the transcendental community of Brook Farm."

Yet there could have been no malice in his satire, for Mrs. Hawthorne's two sisters, Mrs. Mann and Miss Peabody, were both transcendentalists; and so was Horace Mann himself, so far as we know definitely in regard to his metaphysical creed. Do not we all feel at times that the search for abstract truth is like a diet of sawdust or Scotch mist,--a "chimera buzzing in a vacuum"?

James Russell Lowell similarly attacked Emerson in his Cla.s.s Day poem, and afterward became converted to Emerson's views through the influence of Maria White. It is possible that a similar change took place in Hawthorne's consciousness; although his consciousness was so profound and his nature so reticent that what happened in the depths of it was never indicated by more than a few bubbles at the surface. He was emphatically an idealist, as every truly great artist must be, and Transcendentalism was the local costume which ideality wore in Hawthorne's time. He was a philosopher after a way of his own, and his reflections on life and manners often have the highest value. It was inevitable that he should feel and a.s.similate something from the wave of German thought which was sweeping over England and America, and if he did this unconsciously it was so much the better for the quality of his art.

There are evidences of this even among his earliest sketches. In his account of "Sunday at Home" he says: "Time--where a man lives not--what is it but Eternity?" Does he not recognize in this condensed statement Kant's theorem that time is a mental condition, which only exists in man, and for man, and has no place in the external world? In fact, it only exists by divisions of time, and it is _man_ who makes the divisions. The rising of the sun does not const.i.tute time; for the sun is always rising--somewhere. The positivists and Herbert Spencer deny this, and argue to prove that time is an external ent.i.ty--independent of man--like electricity; but Hawthorne did not agree with them. He evidently trusted the validity of his consciousness. In that exquisite pastoral, "The Vision at the Fountain," he says:

"We were aware of each other's presence, not by sight or sound or touch, but by an inward consciousness. Would it not be so among the dead?"

You have probably heard of the German who attempted to evolve a camel out of his inner consciousness. That and similar jibes are common among those persons of whom the Scriptures tell us that they are in the habit of straining at gnats; but Hawthorne believed consciousness to be a trustworthy guide. Why should he not? It was the consciousness of _self_ that raised man above the level of the brute. This was the rock from which Moses struck forth the fountain of everlasting life.

Again, in "Fancy's Show-Box" we meet with the following:

"Or, while none but crimes perpetrated are cognizable before an earthly tribunal, will guilty thoughts,--of which guilty deeds are no more than shadows,--will these draw down the full weight of a condemning sentence in the supreme court of eternity?"

Is this not an induction from or corollary to the preceding? If it is not Kantian philosophy, it is certainly Goethean. Margaret Fuller was the first American critic, if not the first of all critics, to point out that Goethe in writing "Elective Affinities" designed to show that an evil thought may have consequences as serious and irremediable as an evil action--in addition to the well-known homily that evil thoughts lead to evil actions. In his "Hall of Fantasy" Hawthorne mentions Goethe and Swedenborg as two literary idols of the present time who may be expected to endure through all time. Emerson makes the same prediction in one of his poems.

In "Rappacini's Daughter" Hawthorne says: "There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger."

And in "The Select Party" he remarks: "To such beholders it was unreal because they lacked the imaginative faith. Had they been worthy to pa.s.s within its portals, they would have recognized the truth that the dominions which the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become a thousand times more real than the earth whereon they stamp their feet, saying, 'This is solid and substantial! This may be called a fact!'"

The essence of Transcendentalism is the a.s.sertion of the indestructibility of spirit, that mind is more real than matter, and the unseen than the seen. "The visible has value only," says Carlyle, "when it is based on the invisible." No writer of the nineteenth century affirms this more persistently than Hawthorne, and in none of his romances is the principle so conspicuous as in "The House of the Seven Gables." It is a sister's love which, like a cord stronger than steel, binds together the various incidents of the story, while the avaricious Judge Pyncheon, "with his landed estate, public honors, offices of trust and other solid _un_realities," has after all only succeeded in building a card castle for himself, which may be dissipated by a single breath. Holgrave, the daguerreotypist, who serves as a contrast to the fact.i.tious judge, is a genuine character, and may stand for a type of the young New England liberal of 1850: a freethinker, and so much of a transcendentalist that we suspect Hawthorne's model for him to have been one of the younger a.s.sociates of the Brook Farm experiment. He is evidently studied from life, and Hawthorne says of him:

"Altogether, in his culture and want of culture, in his crude, wild, and misty philosophy, and the practical experience that counteracted some of its tendencies; in his magnanimous zeal for man's welfare, and his recklessness of whatever the ages had established in man's behalf; in his faith, and in his infidelity; in what he had, and in what he lacked, the artist might fitly enough stand forth as the representative of many compeers in his native land."

This is a fairly sympathetic portrait, and it largely represents the cla.s.s of young men who went to hear Emerson and supported Charles Sumner. In the story, Holgrave achieves the reward of a veracious nature by winning the heart of the purest and loveliest young woman in American fiction.

If Hawthorne were still living he might object to the foregoing argument as a misrepresentation; nor could he be blamed for this, for Ripley, Th.o.r.eau, Alcott and other like visionary spirits have so vitiated the significance of Transcendentalism that it ought now to be cla.s.sed among words of doubtful and uncertain meaning.

Students of German philosophy are now chiefly known as Kantists or Hegelians, and outside of the universities they are commonly cla.s.sed as Emersonians.

CHAPTER X

FROM CONCORD TO LENOX: 1845-1849

In May, 1845, Paymaster Bridge found himself again on the American coast. Meeting with Franklin Pierce in Boston, they agreed to go to Concord together, and look into Hawthorne's affairs. Soon after breakfast, Mrs. Hawthorne espied them coming through the gateway. She had never met Pierce, but she recognized Bridge's tall, elegant figure, when he waved his hat to her in the distance. Hawthorne himself was sawing and splitting in the wood-shed, and thither she directed his friends--to his no slight astonishment when they appeared before him. Pierce had his arm across Hawthorne's broad shoulders when they reappeared. There is one pleasure, indeed, which young people cannot know, and that is, the meeting of old friends. Mrs. Hawthorne was favorably impressed with Franklin Pierce's personality; while Horatio Bridge danced about and acted an impromptu pantomime, making up faces like an owl. They a.s.sured Hawthorne that something should be done to relieve his financial embarra.s.sment.[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, 281.]

All those whose attention Hawthorne attracted out of the rush and hurry of the world were sure to become interested in his welfare. O'Sullivan, the editor of the _Democratic Review_, had already exerted himself in Hawthorne's behalf; but President Polk evidently did not know who Hawthorne was, so that O'Sullivan was obliged to have a puff inserted in his review for the President's better information. George Bancroft was now in the Cabinet, and could easily have obtained a lucrative post for Hawthorne, but it is plain that Bancroft was not over-friendly to him and that Hawthorne was fully aware of this. Hawthorne had suggested the Salem postmastership, but when O'Sullivan mentioned this, Bancroft objected on the ground that the present inc.u.mbent was too good a man to be displaced, and proposed the consulates of Genoa and Ma.r.s.eilles, two deplorable positions and quite out of the question for Hawthorne, in the condition of his family at that time. Perhaps it would have been better for him in a material sense, if he had accepted the invitation to dine with Margaret Fuller.

The summer wore away, but nothing was acomplished; and late in the autumn Hawthorne left the Old Manse to return to his Uncle Robert Manning's house in Salem, where he could always count on a warm welcome.

There he spent the winter with his wife and child, until suddenly, in March, 1846, he was appointed Surveyor of the Port, or, as it is now more properly called, Collector of Customs.

This was, in truth, worth waiting for. The salary was not large, but it was a dignified position and allowed Hawthorne sufficient leisure for other pursuits,--the leisure of the merchant or banker. Salem had already begun to lose its foreign trade, and for days together it sometimes happened that there was nothing to do. Hawthorne's chief business was to prevent the government from being cheated, either by the importers or by his own subordinates; and it required a pretty sharp eye to do this. All the appointments, even to his own clerks, were made by outside politicians, and when a reduction of employees was necessary, Hawthorne consulted with the local Democratic Committee, and followed their advice. Such a method was not to the advantage of the public service, but it saved Hawthorne from an annoying responsibility. His strictness and impartiality, however, soon brought him into conflict with his more self-important subordinates, who were by no means accustomed to exactness in their dealings, and this finally produced a good deal of official unpleasantness; and the unfavorable reports which were afterward circulated concerning Hawthorne's life during this period, probably originated in that quarter.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE CUSTOM HOUSE, SALEM, Ma.s.s., WHERE HAWTHORNE WAS EMPLOYED AS SURVEYOR OF THE FORT OF SALEM, AT THE TIME OF HIS WRITING "THE SCARLET LETTER"]

All the poetry that Hawthorne could extract from his occupation at the Custom House is to be found in his preface to "The Scarlet Letter," but he withholds from us the prosaic side of it,--as he well might. At times he comes close to caricature, especially in his descriptions of "those venerable inc.u.mbents who hibernated during the winter season, and then crawled out during the warm days of spring to draw their pay and perform those pretended duties, for which they were engaged." There were formerly large numbers of moss-grown loafers in the government service, with whiskey-reddened noses and greasy old clothing, who would sun themselves on the door-steps, and tell anecdotes of General Jackson, Senator Benton, and other popular heroes, with whom they would intimate a good acquaintance at some remote period of their lives. If removed from office, they were quite as likely to turn up in a neighboring jail as in any other location. This is no satire, but serious truth; and instances of it can be given.

Hawthorne's life during the next three years was essentially domestic.

In June, 1846, his son Julian was born--a remarkably vigorous baby--at Doctor Peabody's house in West Street, Boston; Mrs. Hawthorne wisely preferring to be with her own mother during her confinement. [Footnote: At the age of thirty-five, Julian resembled his father so closely that Nathaniel Hawthorne's old friends were sometimes startled by him, as if they had seen an apparition. He was, however, of a stouter build, and his eyes were different.] With two small children on her hands, Mrs.

Hawthorne had slight opportunity to enjoy general society, fashionable or otherwise. Rebecca Manning says, however:

"Neither Hawthorne nor his wife could be said to be 'in society' in the technical sense. When the Peabody family lived in Salem, they were, I have been told, somewhat straitened pecuniarily. After Hawthorne's marriage, I think I remember hearing of his wife going to parties and dinners occasionally. Dr. Loring's wife was her cousin. Other friends were the Misses Howes, one of whom is now Mrs. Cabot of Boston. Mrs.

Foote, who was a daughter of Judge White, was a friend, and I remember some Silsbees who were also her friends. Hawthorne's wife knew how to cultivate her friends and make the most of them far better than either Hawthorne or his sisters did. I have been told that when Hawthorne was a young man, before his marriage, if he had chosen to enter Salem's 'first circle' he would have been welcome there."

During this last sojourn in his native city Hawthorne was chosen on the committee for the lyceum lecture course, and proved instrumental in bringing Webster to Salem,--where he had not been popular since the trial of the two Knapps,--to deliver an oration on the Const.i.tution; of which Mrs. Hawthorne has given a graphic description in a letter to her mother on November 19, 1848:

"The old Lion walked the stage with a sort of repressed rage, when he referred to those persons who cried out, 'Down with the Const.i.tution!'

'Madmen! Or most wicked if not mad!' said he with a glare of fire."

A pure piece of acting. The national Const.i.tution was not even endangered by the Southern rebellion,--much less by the small band of original abolitionists; and Webster was too sensible not to be aware of this.

While Hawthorne was at the Salem Custom House, he made at least two valuable friends: Doctor George B. Loring, who had married a cousin of Mrs. Hawthorne, and William B. Pike, who occupied a subordinate position in the Custom House, but whom Hawthorne valued for moral and intellectual qualities of which he would seem to have been the first discoverer. They were not friends who would be likely to affect Hawthorne's political views, except to encourage him in the direction to which he had always tended. Four years earlier, Doctor Loring had been on cordial terms with Longfellow and Sumner, being a refined and intellectual sort of man, but like Hillard, had withdrawn from them on account of political differences. He was an able public speaker, and became a Democratic politician, until 1862, when he went over to the Republicans; but after that he was looked upon with a good deal of suspicion by both parties. The governorship was supposed to have been the object of his ambition, but he never could obtain the nomination.

Late in life he was appointed Commissioner of Agriculture, a post for which he was eminently fitted, and finally went to Portugal as United States Minister.

William B. Pike either lacked the opportunity or the necessary concentration to develop his genius in the larger world, but Hawthorne continued to communicate with him irregularly until the close of his life. He invited him to Lenox when he resided there, and Mrs. Lathrop recollects seeing him at the Wayside in Concord, after Hawthorne's return from Europe. She discribes him as a "short, st.u.r.dy, phlegmatic and plebeian looking man," but with a gentle step and a finely modulated voice. It may have been as well for him that he never became distinguished. [Footnote: Mrs. Lathrop, "Memories of Hawthorne," 154.]

The war with Mexico was now fairly afield, and Franklin Pierce, who left the United States Senate on account of his wife's health, was organizing a regiment of New Hampshire volunteers, as a "patriotic duty." Salem people thought differently, and party feeling there soon rose to the boiling-point. There is no other community where political excitement is so likely to become virulent as in a small city. In a country town, like Concord, every man feels the necessity for conciliating his neighbor, but the moneyed cla.s.s in Salem was sufficient for its own purposes, and was opposed to the war in a solid body. The Whigs looked upon the invasion of Mexico as a piratical attempt of the Democratic leaders to secure the permanent ascendency of their party, and this was probably the true reason for Franklin Pierce's joining it. In their eyes, Hawthorne was the representative of a corrupt administration, and they would have been more than human if they had not wished him to feel this.

The Salem gentry could not draw him into an argument very well, but they could look daggers at him on the street and exhibit their coldness toward him when they went on business to the Custom House. It is evident that he was made to suffer in some such manner, and to a tenderhearted man with a clear conscience, it must have seemed unkind and unjust.

[Footnote: When the engagement between the "Chesapeake" and the "Shannon" took place off Salem harbor in August, 1813, and Captain Lawrence was killed in the action, the anti-war sentiment ran so high that it was difficult to find a respectable mansion where his funeral would be permitted.] In his Custom House preface, Hawthorne compares the Whigs rather unfavorably with the Democrats, and this is not to be wondered at; but he should have remembered that it was his own party which first introduced the spoils-of-office system.

The first use that Hawthorne made of his government salary was to cancel his obligations to the Concord tradespeople, and the next was to provide a home for his wife and mother. They first moved to 18 Chestnut Street, in June, 1846; and thence to a larger house, 14 Mall Street, in September, 1847, in which "The Snow Image" was prepared for publication, and "The Scarlet Letter" was written. Hawthorne's study or workshop was the front room in the third story, an apartment of some width but with a ceiling in direct contradiction to the elevated thoughts of the writer.

There is an ominous silence in the American Note-book between 1846 and 1850, which is rather increased than diminished by the publication from his diary of a number of extracts concerning the children. The babies of geniuses do not differ essentially from those of other people, and it is not supposable that Hawthorne's reflections during this period were wholly confined to his own family. It is to be hoped that fuller information will yet be given to the public concerning their affairs in Salem; for the truth deserves to be told.

In January, 1846, Mrs. Hawthorne wrote to her mother:

"No one, I think, has a right to break the will of a child, but G.o.d; and if the child is taught to submit to Him through love, all other submission will follow with heavenly effect upon the character. G.o.d never drives even the most desperate sinner, but only invites or suggests through the events of His providence."

Nothing is more unfortunate than to break the will of a child, for all manliness and womanliness is grounded in the will; but it is often necessary to control the desires and humors of children for their self-preservation. Hawthorne himself was not troubled with such fancies.

Alcott, who was his nearest neighbor at the Wayside, once remarked that there was only one will in the Hawthorne family, and that was Nathaniel's. His will was law and no one thought of disputing it.

Yet what he writes concerning children is always sweet, tender, and beautiful, with the single exception of a criticism of his own daughter, which was published long after his death and could not have been intended for the public eye.

The war with Mexico was wonderfully successful from a military point of view, but its political effects were equally confounding to the politicians who projected it. The American people resemble the French, quite as much perhaps as they do the English, and the admiration of military glory is one of their Gallic traits. It happened that the two highest positions in the army were both held by Whig generals, and the victory of Buena Vista carried Zachary Taylor into the White House, in spite of the opposition of Webster and Clay, as well as that of the Democrats and the Free Soilers. Polk, Bancroft, and Pierce had all contributed to the defeat of their own party. The war proved their political terminus to the two former; but, _mirabile dictu_, it became the cap of Fortunatus to Pierce and Hawthorne.

This, however, could not have been foreseen at the time, and the election of Taylor in November, 1848, had a sufficiently chilling effect on the little family in Mall Street. Hawthorne entertained the hope that he might be spared in the general out-turning, as a distinguished writer and an inoffensive partisan, and this indicates how loath he was to relinquish his comfortable position. Let us place ourselves in his situation and we shall not wonder at it. He was now forty-five, with a wife and two children, and dest.i.tution was staring him in the face. For ten years he had struggled bravely, and this was the net result of all his endeavors. Never had the future looked so gloomy to him.

The railroad had superseded his Uncle Manning's business, as it had that of half the mercantile cla.s.s in the city, and his father-in-law was in a somewhat similar predicament. At this time Elizabeth Peabody was keeping a small foreign book-store in a room of her father's house on West Street. One has to realize these conditions, in order to appreciate the mood in which Hawthorne's Custom House preface was written.