Yesterdays with Authors
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Title: Yesterdays with Authors
Author: James Thomas Fields
Release date: June 1, 2004 [eBook #12632]
Most recently updated: October 28, 2024
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK YESTERDAYS WITH AUTHORS ***
YESTERDAYS WITH AUTHORS
By
JAMES T. FIELDS.
"Was it not yesterday we spoke together?"--SHAKESPEARE
Seventeenth Edition
BOSTON:
HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1879
* * * * *
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871,
BY JAMES T. FIELDS,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co., Cambridge.
* * * * *
INSCRIBED
TO MY FELLOW-MEMBERS OF
THE SATURDAY CLUB.
* * * * *
Preface to the Project Gutenberg Edition.
James Fields (1817-1881) at age 14 became a clerk in a bookstore in
Boston, and in a few years became a partner in the bookselling firm of
Ticknor, Reed and Fields.
Fields's firm became the publisher for most of the great American
writers of the Nineteenth Century. In this book, Fields tells how he
persuaded a jobless, despondent Nathaniel Hawthorne to let him print
"The Scarlet Letter."
Fields made frequent visits to England to land the American publishing
rights to the works of important British writers, including the great
superstar of the time, Charles Dickens. Dickens accepted Fields as a
personal friend, entertained him at his retreat, Gad's Hill, and wrote
him many amusing notes that are included here. Fields also socialized
with the cream of London literary society, and the book includes his
personal anecdotes of meeting Wordsworth, Thackeray, and others. He
formed a friendship with Mary Russell Mitford (a successful dramatist
and novelist of the day; two of her works are available in Project
Gutenberg editions) and she wrote him long, gossipy letters, reproduced
here.
The firm of Ticknor and Fields, after many mergers and acquisitions,
continues to exist today as Houghton Mifflin Books. The firm's original
store, the Old Corner Bookstore, still exists as a bookstore at the
corner of School and Washington streets in Boston.
* * * * *
CONTENTS.
I. INTRODUCTORY
II. THACKERAY
III. HAWTHORNE
IV. DICKENS
V. WORDSWORTH
VI. MISS MITFORD
VII. "BARRY CORNWALL" AND SOME OF HIS FRIENDS
INTRODUCTORY.
* * * * *
"_Some there are,
By their good works exalted, lofty minds
And meditative, authors of delight
And happiness, which to the end of time
Will live, and spread, and kindle_."
WORDSWORTH.
I. INTRODUCTORY.
Surrounded by the portraits of those I have long counted my friends, I
like to chat with the people about me concerning these pictures, my
companions on the wall, and the men and women they represent. These are
my assembled guests, who dropped in years ago and stayed with me,
without the form of invitation or demand on my time or thought. They are
my eloquent silent partners for life, and I trust they will dwell here
as long as I do. Some of them I have known intimately; several of them
lived in other times; but they are all my friends and associates in a
certain sense.
To converse with them and of them--
"When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past"--
is one of the delights of existence, and I am never tired of answering
questions about them, or gossiping of my own free will as to their
every-day life and manners.
If I were to call the little collection in this diminutive house a
_Gallery of Pictures_, in the usual sense of that title, many would
smile and remind me of what Foote said with his characteristic sharpness
of David Garrick, when he joined his brother Peter in the wine trade:
"Davy lived with three quarts of vinegar in the cellar, calling himself
a wine merchant."
My friends have often heard me in my "garrulous old age" discourse of
things past and gone, and know what they bring down on their heads when
they request me "to run over," as they call it, the faces looking out
upon us from these plain unvarnished frames.
Let us begin, then, with the little man of Twickenham, for that is his
portrait which hangs over the front fireplace. An original portrait of
Alexander Pope I certainly never expected to possess, and I must relate
how I came by it. Only a year ago I was strolling in my vagabond way up
and down the London streets, and dropped in to see an old
picture-shop,--kept by a man so thoroughly instructed in his calling
that it is always a pleasure to talk with him and examine his collection
of valuables, albeit his treasures are of such preciousness as to make
the humble purse of a commoner seem to shrink into a still smaller
compass from sheer inability to respond when prices are named. At No. 6
Pall Mall one is apt to find Mr. Graves "clipp'd round about" by
first-rate canvas. When I dropped in upon him that summer morning he had
just returned from the sale of the Marquis of Hastings's effects. The
Marquis, it will be remembered, went wrong, and his debts swallowed up
everything. It was a wretched stormy day when the pictures were sold,
and Mr. Graves secured, at very moderate prices, five original
portraits. All the paintings had suffered more or less decay, and some
of them, with their frames, had fallen to the floor. One of the best
preserved pictures inherited by the late Marquis was a portrait of Pope,
painted from life by Richardson for the Earl of Burlington, and even
that had been allowed to drop out of its oaken frame. Horace Walpole
says, Jonathan Richardson was undoubtedly one of the best painters of a
head that had appeared in England. He was pupil of the celebrated Riley,
the master of Hudson, of whom Sir Joshua took lessons in his art, and it
was Richardson's "Treatise on Painting" which inflamed the mind of
young Reynolds, and stimulated his ambition to become a great painter.
Pope seems to have had a real affection for Richardson, and probably sat
to him for this picture some time during the year 1732. In Pope's
correspondence there is a letter addressed to the painter making an
engagement with him for a several days' sitting, and it is quite
probable that the portrait before us was finished at that time. One can
imagine the painter and the poet chatting together day after day, in
presence of that canvas. During the same year Pope's mother died, at the
great age of ninety-three; and on the evening of June 10th, while she
lay dead in the house, Pope sent off the following heart-touching letter
from Twickenham to his friend the painter:--
"As you know you and I mutually desire to see one another, I hoped
that this day our wishes would have met, and brought you hither. And
this for the very reason which possibly might hinder your coming,
that my poor mother is dead. I thank God, her death was as easy as
her life was innocent; and as it cost her not a groan, or even a
sigh, there is yet upon her countenance such an expression of
tranquillity, nay, almost of pleasure, that it is even amiable to
behold it. It would afford the finest image of a saint expired that
ever painting drew; and it would be the greatest obligation which
even that obliging art could ever bestow on a friend, if you could
come and sketch it for me. I am sure, if there be no very prevalent
obstacle, you will leave any common business to do this; and I hope
to see you this evening, as late as you will, or to-morrow morning
as early, before this winter flower is faded. I will defer her
interment till to-morrow night. I know you love me, or I could not
have written this; I could not (at this time) have written at all.
Adieu! May you die as happily!"
Several eminent artists of that day painted the likeness of Pope, and
among them Sir Godfrey Kneller and Jervas, but I like the expression of
this one by Richardson best of all. The mouth, it will be observed, is
very sensitive and the eyes almost painfully so. It is told of the poet,
that when he was a boy "there was great sweetness in his look," and
that his face was plump and pretty, and that he had a very fresh
complexion. Continual study ruined his constitution and changed his
form, it is said. Richardson has skilfully kept out of sight the poor
little decrepit figure, and gives us only the beautiful head of a man of
genius. I scarcely know a face on canvas that expresses the poetical
sense in a higher degree than this one. The likeness must be perfect,
and I can imagine the delight of the Rev. Joseph Spence hobbling into
his presence on the 4th of September, 1735, after "a ragged boy of an
ostler came in with a little scrap of paper not half an inch broad,
which contained the following words: 'Mr. Pope would be very glad to see
Mr. Spence at the Cross Inn just now.'"
English literature is full of eulogistic mention of Pope. Thackeray is
one of the last great authors who has spoken golden words about the
poet. "Let us always take into account," he says, "that constant
tenderness and fidelity of affection which pervaded and sanctified his
life."
What pluck and dauntless courage possessed the "gallant little cripple"
of Twickenham! When all the dunces of England were aiming their
poisonous barbs at him, he said, "I had rather die at once, than live in
fear of those rascals." A vast deal that has been written about him is
untrue. No author has been more elaborately slandered on principle, or
more studiously abused through envy. Smarting dullards went about for
years, with an ever-ready microscope, hunting for flaws in his character
that might be injuriously exposed; but to-day his defamers are in bad
repute. Excellence in a fellow-mortal is to many men worse than death;
and great suffering fell upon a host of mediocre writers when Pope
uplifted his sceptre and sat supreme above them all.
Pope's latest champion is John Ruskin. Open his Lectures on Art,
recently delivered before the University of Oxford, and read passage
number seventy. Let us read it together, as we sit here in the presence
of the sensitive poet.
"I want you to think over the relation of expression to character in
two great masters of the absolute art of language, Virgil and Pope.
You are perhaps surprised at the last named; and indeed you have in
English much higher grasp and melody of language from more
passionate minds, but you have nothing else, in its range, so
perfect. I name, therefore, these two men, because they are the two
most accomplished _artists_, merely as such, whom I know, in
literature; and because I think you will be afterwards interested in
investigating how the infinite grace in the words of the one, the
severity in those of the other, and the precision in those of both,
arise wholly out of the moral elements of their minds,--out of the
deep tenderness in Virgil which enabled him to write the stories of
Nisus and Lausus, and the serene and just benevolence which placed
Pope, in his theology, two centuries in advance of his time, and
enabled him to sum the law of noble life in two lines which, so far
as I know, are the most complete, the most concise, and the most
lofty expression of moral temper existing in English words:--
'Never elated, while one man's oppressed;
Never dejected, while another's blessed.'
I wish you also to remember these lines of Pope, and to make
yourselves entirely masters of his system of ethics; because,
putting Shakespeare aside as rather the world's than ours, I hold
Pope to be the most perfect representative we have, since Chaucer,
of the true English mind; and I think the Dunciad is the most
absolutely chiselled and monumental work 'exacted' in our country.
You will find, as you study Pope, that he has expressed for you, in
the strictest language and within the briefest limits, every law of
art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, and, finally, of a
benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned, contented with its
allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation to
Him in whose hands lies that of the universe."
Glance up at the tender eyes of the poet, who seems to have been eagerly
listening while we have been reading Ruskin's beautiful tribute. As he
is so intent upon us, let me gratify still further the honest pride of
"the little nightingale," as they used to call him when he was a child,
and read to you from the "Causeries du Lundi" what that wise French
critic, Sainte-Beuve, has written of his favorite English poet:--
"The natural history of Pope is very simple: delicate persons, it
has been said, are unhappy, and he was doubly delicate, delicate of
mind, delicate and infirm of body; he was doubly irritable. But what
grace, what taste, what swiftness to feel, what justness and
perfection in expressing his feeling!... His first masters were
insignificant; he educated himself: at twelve years old he learned
Latin and Greek together, and almost without a master; at fifteen he
resolved to go to London, in order to learn French and Italian
there, by reading the authors. His family, retired from trade, and
Catholic, lived at this time upon an estate in the forest of
Windsor. This desire of his was considered as an odd caprice, for
his health from that time hardly permitted him to move about. He
persisted, and accomplished his project; he learned nearly
everything thus by himself, making his own choice among authors,
getting the grammar quite alone, and his pleasure was to translate
into verse the finest passages he met with among the Latin and Greek
poets. When he was about sixteen years old, he said, his taste was
formed as much as it was later.... If such a thing as literary
temperament exist, it never discovered itself in a manner more
clearly defined and more decided than with Pope. Men ordinarily
become classic by means of the fact and discipline of education; he
was so by vocation, so to speak, and by a natural originality. At
the same time with the poets, he read the best among the critics,
and prepared himself to speak after them.
* * * * *
"Pope had the characteristic sign of literary natures, the faithful
worship of genius.... He said one day to a friend: 'I have always
been particularly struck with this passage of Homer where he
represents to us Priam transported with grief for the loss of
Hector, on the point of breaking out into reproaches and invectives
against the servants who surrounded him and against his sons. It
would be impossible for me to read this passage without weeping over
the disasters of the unfortunate old king.' And then he took the
book, and tried to read aloud the passage, 'Go, wretches, curse of
my life,' but he was interrupted by tears.
* * * * *
"No example could prove to us better than his to what degree the
faculty of tender, sensitive criticism is an active faculty. We
neither feel nor perceive in this way when there is nothing to give
in return. This taste, this sensibility, so swift and alert, justly
supposes imagination behind it. It is said that Shelley, the first
time he heard the poem of 'Christabel' recited, at a certain
magnificent and terrible passage, took fright and suddenly fainted.
The whole poem of 'Alastor' was to be foreseen in that fainting.
Pope, not less sensitive in his way, could not read through that
passage of the Iliad without bursting into tears. To be a critic to
that degree, is to be a poet."
Thanks, eloquent and judicious scholar, so lately gone from the world of
letters! A love of what is best in art was the habit of Sainte-Beuve's
life, and so he too will be remembered as one who has kept the best
company in literature,--a man who cheerfully did homage to genius,
wherever and whenever it might be found.
I intend to leave as a legacy to a dear friend of mine an old faded
book, which I hope he will always prize as it deserves. It is a
well-worn, well-read volume, of no value whatever as an _edition_,--but
_it belonged to Abraham Lincoln_. It is his copy of "The Poetical Works
of Alexander Pope, Esq., to which is prefixed the life of the author by
Dr. Johnson." It bears the imprint on the title-page of J.J. Woodward,
Philadelphia, and was published in 1839. Our President wrote his own
name in it, and chronicles the fact that it was presented to him "by his
friend N.W. Edwards." In January, 1861, Mr. Lincoln gave the book to a
very dear friend of his, who honored me with it in January, 1867, as a
New-Year's present. As long as I live it will remain among my books,
specially treasured as having been owned and read by one of the noblest
and most sorely tried of men, a hero comparable with any of
Plutarch's,--
"The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man,
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame,
New birth of our new soil, the first American."
THACKERAY
* * * * *
_What Emerson has said in his fine subtle way of Shakespeare may well be
applied to the author of "Vanity Fair."
"One can discern in his ample pictures what forms and humanities pleased
him; his delight in troops of friends, in large hospitality, in cheerful
giving._
* * * * *
_"He read the hearts of men and women, their probity, and their second
thought, and wiles; the wiles of innocence, and the transitions by which
virtues and vices slide into their contraries."_
II. THACKERAY.
Dear old Thackeray!--as everybody who knew him intimately calls him, now
he is gone. That is his face, looking out upon us, next to Pope's. What
a contrast in bodily appearance those two English men of genius present!
Thackeray's great burly figure, broad-chested, and ample as the day,
seems to overshadow and quite blot out of existence the author of "The
Essay on Man." But what friends they would have been had they lived as
contemporaries under Queen Anne or Queen Victoria! One can imagine the
author of "Pendennis" gently lifting poor little Alexander out of his
"chariot" into the club, and revelling in talk with him all night long.
Pope's high-bred and gentlemanly manner, combined with his extraordinary
sensibility and dread of ridicule, would have modified Thackeray's usual
gigantic fun and sometimes boisterous sarcasm into a rich and strange
adaptability to his little guest. We can imagine them talking together
now, with even a nobler wisdom and ampler charity than were ever
vouchsafed to them when they were busy amid the turmoils of their
crowded literary lives.
As a reader and lover of all that Thackeray has written and published,
as well as a personal friend, I will relate briefly something of his
literary habits as I can recall them. It is now nearly twenty years
since I first saw him and came to know him familiarly in London. I was
very much in earnest to have him come to America, and read his series
of lectures on "The English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century," and
when I talked the matter over with some of his friends at the little
Garrick Club, they all said he could never be induced to leave London
long enough for such an expedition. Next morning, after this talk at the
Garrick, the elderly damsel of all work announced to me, as I was taking
breakfast at my lodgings, that Mr. _Sackville_ had called to see me, and
was then waiting below. Very soon I heard a heavy tread on the stairs,
and then entered a tall, white-haired stranger, who held out his hand,
bowed profoundly, and with a most comical expression announced himself
as Mr. Sackville. Recognizing at once the face from published portraits,
I knew that my visitor was none other than Thackeray himself, who,
having heard the servant give the wrong name, determined to assume it on
this occasion. For years afterwards, when he would drop in unexpectedly,
both at home and abroad, he delighted to call himself Mr. Sackville,
until a certain Milesian waiter at the Tremont House addressed him as
Mr. Thack_uary_, when he adopted that name in preference to the other.
Questions are frequently asked as to the habits of thought and
composition of authors one has happened to know, as if an author's
friends were commonly invited to observe the growth of works he was by
and by to launch from the press. It is not customary for the doors of
the writer's work-shop to be thrown open, and for this reason it is all
the more interesting to notice, when it is possible, how an essay, a
history, a novel, or a poem is conceived, grows up, and is corrected for
publication. One would like very much to be informed how Shakespeare put
together the scenes of Hamlet or Macbeth, whether the subtile thought
accumulated easily on the page before him, or whether he struggled for
it with anxiety and distrust. We know that Milton troubled himself about
little matters of punctuation, and obliged the printer to take special
note of his requirements, scolding him roundly when he neglected his
instructions. We also know that Melanchthon was in his library hard at
work by two or three o'clock in the morning both in summer and winter,
and that Sir William Jones began his studies with the dawn.
The most popular female writer of America, whose great novel struck a
chord of universal sympathy throughout the civilized world, has habits
of composition peculiarly her own, and unlike those belonging to any
author of whom we have record. She _croons_, so to speak, over her
writings, and it makes very little difference to her whether there is a
crowd of people about her or whether she is alone during the composition
of her books. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" was wholly prepared for the press in a
little wooden house in Maine, from week to week, while the story was
coming out in a Washington newspaper. Most of it was written by the
evening lamp, on a pine table, about which the children of the family
were gathered together conning their various lessons for the next day.
Amid the busy hum of earnest voices, constantly asking questions of the
mother, intent on her world-renowned task, Mrs. Stowe wove together
those thrilling chapters which were destined to find readers in so many
languages throughout the globe. No work of similar importance, so far as
we know, was ever written amid so much that seemed hostile to literary
composition.
I had the opportunity, both in England and America, of observing the
literary habits of Thackeray, and it always seemed to me that he did his
work with comparative ease, but was somewhat influenced by a custom of
procrastination. Nearly all his stories were written in monthly
instalments for magazines, with the press at his heels. He told me that
when he began a novel he rarely knew how many people were to figure in
it, and, to use his own words, he was always very shaky about their
moral conduct. He said that sometimes, especially if he had been dining
late and did not feel in remarkably good-humor next morning, he was
inclined to make his characters villanously wicked; but if he rose
serene with an unclouded brain, there was no end to the lovely actions
he was willing to make his men and women perform. When he had written a
passage that pleased him very much he could not resist clapping on his
hat and rushing forth to find an acquaintance to whom he might instantly
read his successful composition. Gilbert Wakefield, universally
acknowledged to have been the best Greek scholar of his time, said he
would have turned out a much better one, if he had begun earlier to
study that language; but unfortunately he did not begin till he was
fifteen years of age. Thackeray, in quoting to me this saying of
Wakefield, remarked: "My English would have been very much better if I
had read Fielding before I was ten." This observation was a valuable
hint, on the part of Thackeray, as to whom he considered his master in
art.
James Hannay paid Thackeray a beautiful compliment when he said: "If he
had had his choice he would rather have been famous as an artist than as
a writer; but it was destined that he should paint in colors which will
never crack and never need restoration." Thackeray's characters are,
indeed, not so much _inventions_ as _existences_, and we know them as we
know our best friends or our most intimate enemies.
When I was asked, the other day, which of his books I like best, I gave
the old answer to a similar question. "_The last one I read_." If I
could possess only _one_ of his works, I think I should choose "Henry
Esmond." To my thinking, it is a marvel in literature, and I have read
it oftener than any of the other works. Perhaps the reason of my
partiality lies somewhat in this little incident. One day, in the snowy
winter of 1852, I met Thackeray sturdily ploughing his way down Beacon
Street with a copy of "Henry Esmond" (the English edition, then just
issued) under his arm. Seeing me some way off, he held aloft the volumes
and began to shout in great glee. When I came up to him he cried out,
"Here is the _very_ best I can do, and I am carrying it to Prescott as a
reward of merit for having given me my first dinner in America. I stand
by this book, and am willing to leave it, when I go, as my card."
As he wrote from month to month, and liked to put off the inevitable
chapters till the last moment, he was often in great tribulation. I
happened to be one of a large company whom he had invited to a
six-o'clock dinner at Greenwich one summer afternoon, several years ago.
We were all to go down from London, assemble in a particular room at the
hotel, where he was to meet us at six o'clock, _sharp_. Accordingly we
took steamer and gathered ourselves together in the reception-room at
the appointed time. When the clock struck six, our host had not
fulfilled his part of the contract. His burly figure was yet wanting
among the company assembled. As the guests were nearly all strangers to
each other, and as there was no one present to introduce us, a profound
silence fell upon the room, and we anxiously looked out of the windows,
hoping every moment that Thackeray would arrive. This untoward state of
things went on for one hour, still no Thackeray and no dinner. English
reticence would not allow any remark as to the absence of our host.
Everybody felt serious and a gloom fell upon the assembled party. Still
no Thackeray. The landlord, the butler, and the waiters rushed in and
out the room, shrieking for the master of the feast, who as yet had not
arrived. It was confidentially whispered by a fat gentleman, with a
hungry look, that the dinner was utterly spoiled twenty minutes ago,
when we heard a merry shout in the entry and Thackeray bounced into the
room. He had not changed his morning dress, and ink was still visible
upon his fingers. Clapping his hands and pirouetting briskly on one leg,
he cried out, "Thank Heaven, the last sheet of The Virginians has just
gone to the printer." He made no apology for his late appearance,
introduced nobody, shook hands heartily with everybody, and begged us
all to be seated as quickly as possible. His exquisite delight at
completing his book swept away every other feeling, and we all shared
his pleasure, albeit the dinner was overdone throughout.
The most finished and elegant of all _lecturers_, Thackeray often made a
very poor appearance when he attempted to deliver a set speech to a
public assembly. He frequently broke down after the first two or three
sentences. He prepared what he intended to say with great exactness, and
his favorite delusion was that he was about to astonish everybody with a
remarkable effort. It never disturbed him that he commonly made a woful
failure when he attempted speech-making, but he sat down with such cool
serenity if he found that he could not recall what he wished to say,
that his audience could not help joining in and smiling with him when he
came to a stand-still. Once he asked me to travel with him from London
to Manchester to hear a great speech he was going to make at the
founding of the Free Library Institution in that city. All the way down
he was discoursing of certain effects he intended to produce on the
Manchester dons by his eloquent appeals to their pockets. This passage
was to have great influence with the rich merchants, this one with the
clergy, and so on. He said that although Dickens and Bulwer and Sir
James Stephen, all eloquent speakers, were to precede him, he intended
to beat each of them on this special occasion. He insisted that I
should be seated directly in front of him, so that I should have the
full force of his magic eloquence. The occasion was a most brilliant
one; tickets had been in demand at unheard-of prices several weeks
before the day appointed; the great hall, then opened for the first time
to the public, was filled by an audience such as is seldom convened,
even in England. The three speeches which came before Thackeray was
called upon were admirably suited to the occasion, and most eloquently
spoken. Sir John Potter, who presided, then rose, and after some
complimentary allusions to the author of "Vanity Fair," introduced him
to the crowd, who welcomed him with ringing plaudits. As he rose, he
gave me a half-wink from under his spectacles, as if to say: "Now for
it; the others have done very well, but I will show 'em a grace beyond
the reach of their art." He began in a clear and charming manner, and
was absolutely perfect for three minutes. In the middle of a most
earnest and elaborate sentence he suddenly stopped, gave a look of comic
despair at the ceiling, crammed both hands into his trousers' pockets,
and deliberately sat down. Everybody seemed to understand that it was
one of Thackeray's unfinished speeches and there were no signs of
surprise or discontent among his audience. He continued to sit on the
platform in a perfectly composed manner; and when the meeting was over
he said to me, without a sign of discomfiture, "My boy, you have my
profoundest sympathy; this day you have accidentally missed hearing one
of the finest speeches ever composed for delivery by a great British
orator." And I never heard him mention the subject again.
Thackeray rarely took any exercise, thus living in striking contrast to
the other celebrated novelist of our time, who was remarkable for the
number of hours he daily spent in the open air. It seems to be almost
certain now, from concurrent testimony, gathered from physicians and
those who knew him best in England, that Thackeray's premature death was
hastened by an utter disregard of the natural laws. His vigorous frame
gave ample promise of longevity, but he drew too largely on his brain
and not enough on his legs. _High_ living and high _thinking_, he used
to say, was the correct reading of the proverb.
He was a man of the tenderest feelings, very apt to be cajoled into
doing what the world calls foolish things, and constantly performing
feats of unwisdom, which performances he was immoderately laughing at
all the while in his books. No man has impaled snobbery with such a
stinging rapier, but he always accused himself of being a snob, past all
cure. This I make no doubt was one of his exaggerations, but there was a
grain of truth in the remark, which so sharp an observer as himself
could not fail to notice, even though the victim was so near home.
Thackeray announced to me by letter in the early autumn of 1852 that he
had determined to visit America, and would sail for Boston by the Canada
on the 30th of October. All the necessary arrangements for his lecturing
tour had been made without troubling him with any of the details. He
arrived on a frosty November evening, and went directly to the Tremont
House, where rooms had been engaged for him. I remember his delight in
getting off the sea, and the enthusiasm with which he hailed the
announcement that dinner would be ready shortly. A few friends were
ready to sit down with him, and he seemed greatly to enjoy the novelty
of an American repast. In London he had been very curious in his
inquiries about American oysters, as marvellous stories, which
he did not believe, had been told him of their great size. We
apologized--although we had taken care that the largest specimens to be
procured should startle his unwonted vision when he came to the
table--for what we called the extreme _smallness_ of the oysters,
promising that we would do better next time. Six bloated Falstaffian
bivalves lay before him in their shells. I noticed that he gazed at them
anxiously with fork upraised; then he whispered to me, with a look of
anguish, "How shall I do it?" I described to him the simple process by
which the free-born citizens of America were accustomed to accomplish
such a task. He seemed satisfied that the thing was feasible, selected
the smallest one in the half-dozen (rejecting a large one, "because," he
said, "it resembled the High Priest's servant's ear that Peter cut off")
and then bowed his head as if he were saying grace. All eyes were upon
him to watch the effect of a new sensation in the person of a great
British author. Opening his mouth very wide, he struggled for a moment,
and then all was over. I shall never forget the comic look of despair he
cast upon the other five over-occupied shells. I broke the perfect
stillness by asking him how he felt. "Profoundly grateful," he gasped,
"and as if I had swallowed a little baby." It was many years ago since
we gathered about him on that occasion, but, if my memory serves me, we
had what might be called _a pleasant evening_. Indeed, I remember much
hilarity, and sounds as of men laughing and singing far into midnight. I
could not deny, if called upon to testify in court, that we had a _good
time_ on that frosty November evening.
We had many happy days and nights together both in England and America,
but I remember none happier than that evening we passed with him when
the Punch people came to dine at his own table with the silver statuette
of Mr. Punch in full dress looking down upon the hospitable board from
the head of the table. This silver figure always stood in a conspicuous
place when Tom Taylor, Mark Lemon, Shirley Brooks, and the rest of his
jolly companions and life-long cronies were gathered together. If I were
to say here that there were any dull moments on _that_ occasion, I
should not expect to be strictly believed.
Thackeray's playfulness was a marked peculiarity; a great deal of the
time he seemed like a school-boy, just released from his task. In the
midst of the most serious topic under discussion he was fond of asking
permission to sing a comic song, or he would beg to be allowed to
enliven the occasion by the instant introduction of a brief
double-shuffle. Barry Cornwall told me that when he and Charles Lamb
were once making up a dinner-party together, Charles asked him not to
invite a certain lugubrious friend of theirs. "Because," said Lamb, "he
would cast a damper even over a funeral." I have often contrasted the
habitual qualities of that gloomy friend of theirs with the astounding
spirits of both Thackeray and Dickens. They always seemed to me to be
standing in the sunshine, and to be constantly warning other people out
of cloudland. During Thackeray's first visit to America his jollity knew
no bounds, and it became necessary often to repress him when he was
walking in the street. I well remember his uproarious shouting and
dancing when he was told that the tickets to his first course of
readings were all sold, and when we rode together from his hotel to the
lecture-hall he insisted on thrusting both his long legs out of the
carriage window, in deference, as he said, to his magnanimous
ticket-holders. An instance of his procrastination occurred the evening
of his first public appearance in America. His lecture was advertised to
take place at half past seven, and when he was informed of the hour, he
said he would try and be ready at eight o'clock, but thought it very
doubtful. Horrified at this assertion, I tried to impress upon him the
importance of punctuality on this, the night of his first bow to an
American audience. At a quarter past seven I called for him, and found
him not only unshaved and undressed for the evening, but rapturously
absorbed in making a pen-and-ink drawing to illustrate a passage in
Goethe's Sorrows of Werther, for a lady, which illustration,--a charming
one, by the way, for he was greatly skilled in drawing,--he vowed he
would finish before he would budge an inch in the direction of the (I
omit the adjective) Melodeon. A comical incident occurred just as he was
about leaving the hall, after his first lecture in Boston. A shabby,
ungainly looking man stepped briskly up to him in the anteroom, seized
his hand and announced himself as "proprietor of the Mammoth Rat," and
proposed to exchange season tickets. Thackeray, with the utmost gravity,
exchanged cards and promised to call on the wonderful quadruped next
day.
Thackeray's motto was 'Avoid performing to-day, if possible, what can be
postponed till to-morrow.' Although he received large sums for his
writings, he managed without much difficulty to keep his expenditures
fully abreast, and often in advance of, his receipts. His pecuniary
object in visiting America the second time was to lay up, as he said, a
"pot of money" for his two daughters, and he left the country with more
than half his lecture engagements unfulfilled. He was to have visited
various cities in the Middle and Western States; but he took up a
newspaper one night, in his hotel in New York, before retiring, saw a
steamer advertised to sail the next morning for England, was seized with
a sudden fit of homesickness, rang the bell for his servant, who packed
up his luggage that night, and the next day he sailed. The first
intimation I had of his departure was a card which he sent by the pilot
of the steamer, with these words upon it: "Good by, Fields; good by,
Mrs. Fields; God bless everybody, says W.M.T." Of course he did not
avail himself of the opportunity afforded him for receiving a very large
sum in America, and he afterwards told me in London, that if Mr. Astor
had offered him half his fortune if he would allow that particular
steamer to sail without him, he should have declined the
well-intentioned but impossible favor, and gone on board.
No man has left behind him a tenderer regard for his genius and foibles
among his friends than Thackeray. He had a natural love of good which
nothing could wholly blur or destroy. He was a most generous critic of
the writings of his contemporaries, and no one has printed or spoken
warmer praise of Dickens, in one sense his great rival, than he.
Thackeray was not a voluminous correspondent, but what exquisite letters
he has left in the hands of many of his friends! "Should any letters
arrive," he says in a little missive from Philadelphia, "addressed to
the care of J.T.F. for the ridiculous author of this, that, and the
other, F. is requested to send them to Mercantile Library, Baltimore. My
ghostly enemy will be delighted (or will gnash his teeth with rage) to
hear that the lectures in the capital of Pa. have been very well
attended. No less than 750 people paid at the door on Friday night, and
though last night there was a storm of snow so furious that no
reasonable mortal could face it, 500 (at least) amiable maniacs were in
the lecture-room, and wept over the fate of the last king of these
colonies."
Almost every day, while he was lecturing in America, he would send off
little notes exquisitely written in point of penmanship, and sometimes
embellished with characteristic pen-drawings. Having attended an
extemporaneous supper festival at "Porter's," he was never tired of
"going again." Here is a scrap of paper holding these few words,
written in 1852.
"Nine o'clock, P.M. Tremont.
"Arrangements have just been concluded for a meeting _somewhere_
to-night, which we much desire you should attend. Are you equal to
two nights running of good time?"
Then follows a pen portrait of a friend of his with a cloven foot and a
devil's tail just visible under his cloak Sometimes, to puzzle his
correspondent, he would write in so small a hand that the note could not
be read without the aid of a magnifying-glass. Calligraphy was to him
one of the fine arts, and he once told Dr. John Brown of Edinburgh, that
if all trades failed, he would earn sixpences by writing the Lord's
Prayer and the Creed (not the Athanasian) in the size of that coin. He
greatly delighted in rhyming and lisping notes and billets. Here is one
of them, dated from Baltimore without signature:--
"Dear F----th! The thanguinary fateth (I don't know what their anger
meanth) brought me your letter of the eighth, yethterday, only the
fifteenth! What blunder cauthed by chill delay (thee Doctor
Johnthon'th noble verthe) Thuth kept my longing thoul away, from all
that motht I love on earth? Thankth for the happy contenth!--thothe
Dithpatched to J.G.K. and Thonth, and that thmall letter you
inclothe from Parith, from my dearetht oneth! I pray each month may
tho increathe my thmall account with J.G. King, that all the thipth
which croth the theath, good tidingth of my girlth may bring!--that
every blething fortune yieldth, I altho pray, may come to path on
Mithter and Mrth. J.T. F----th, and all good friendth in Bothton,
Math.!"
While he was staying at the Clarendon Hotel, in New York, every
morning's mail brought a few lines, sometimes only one line, sometimes
only two words, from him, reporting progress. One day he tells me:
"Immense hawdience last night." Another day he says: "Our shares look
very much up this morning." On the 29th of November, 1852, he writes:
"I find I have a much bigger voice than I knew of, and am not afraid of
anybody." At another time he writes: "I make no doubt you have seen that
admirable paper, the New York Herald, and are aware of the excellent
reception my lectures are having in this city. It was a lucky Friday
when first I set foot in this country. I have nearly saved the fifty
dollars you lent me in Boston." In a letter from Savannah, dated the
19th of March, 1853, in answer to one I had written to him, telling him
that a charming epistle, which accompanied the gift of a silver mug he
had sent to me some time before, had been stolen from me, he says:--
"My dear fellow, I remember I asked you in that letter to accept a
silver mug in token of our pleasant days together, and to drink a
health sometimes in it to a sincere friend.... Smith and Elder write
me word they have sent by a Cunard to Boston a packet of paper,
stamped etc. in London. I want it to be taken from the Custom-House,
dooties paid etc., and dispatched to Miss ----, New York. Hold your
tongue, and don't laugh, you rogue. Why shouldn't she have her
paper, and I my pleasure, without your wicked, wicked sneers and
imperence? I'm only a cipher in the young lady's estimation, and why
shouldn't I sigh for her if I like. I hope I shall see you all at
Boston before very long. I always consider Boston as my native
place, you know."
I wish I could recall half the incidents connected with the dear, dear
old Thackeray days, when I saw him so constantly and enjoyed him so
hugely; but, alas! many of them are gone, with much more that is lovely
and would have been of _good report_, could they be now
remembered;--they are dead as--(Holmes always puts your simile quite
right for you),--
"Dead as the bulrushes round little Moses,
On the old banks of the Nile."
But while I sit here quietly, and have no fear of any bad,
unsympathizing listeners who might, if some other subject were up,
frown upon my levity, let me walk through the dusky chambers of my
memory and report what I find there, just as the records turn up,
without regard to method.
I once made a pilgrimage with Thackeray (at my request, of course, the
visits were planned) to the various houses where his books had been
written; and I remember when we came to Young Street, Kensington, he
said, with mock gravity, "Down on your knees, you rogue, for here
'Vanity Fair' was penned! And I will go down with you, for I have a high
opinion of that little production myself." He was always perfectly
honest in his expressions about his own writings, and it was delightful
to hear him praise them when he could depend on his listeners. A friend
congratulated him once on that touch in "Vanity Fair" in which Becky
"_admires_" her husband when he is giving Steyne the punishment which
ruins _her_ for life. "Well," he said, "when I wrote the sentence, I
slapped my fist on the table and said, _'That_ is a touch of genius!'"
He told me he was nearly forty years old before he was recognized in
literature as belonging to a class of writers at all above the ordinary
magazinists of his day. "I turned off far better things then than I do
now," said he, "and I wanted money sadly, (my parents were rich but
respectable, and I had spent my guineas in my youth,) but how little I
got for my work! It makes me laugh," he continued, "at what The Times
pays me now, when I think of the old days, and how much better I wrote
for them then, and got a shilling where I now get ten."
One day he wanted a little service done for a friend, and I remember his
very quizzical expression, as he said, "Please say the favor asked will
greatly oblige a man of the name of Thackeray, whose only recommendation
is, that he has seen Napoleon and Goethe, and is the owner of Schiller's
sword."
I think he told me he and Tennyson were at one time intimate; but I
distinctly remember a description he gave me of having heard the poet,
when a young man, storming about in the first rapture of composing his
poem of "Ulysses." One line of it Tennyson greatly revelled in,--
"And see the great Achilles, whom we knew."
"He went through the streets," said Thackeray, "screaming about his
great Achilles, whom we knew," as if we had all made the acquaintance of
that gentleman, and were very proud of it.
One of the most comical and interesting occasions I remember, in
connection with Thackeray, was going with him to a grand concert given
fifteen or twenty years ago by Madame Sontag. We sat near an entrance
door in the hall, and every one who came in, male and female, Thackeray
pretended to know, and gave each one a name and brief chronicle, as the
presence flitted by. It was in Boston, and as he had been in town only a
day or two, and knew only half a dozen people in it, the biographies
were most amusing. As I happened to know several people who passed, it
was droll enough to hear this great master of character give them their
dues. Mr. Choate moved along in his regal, affluent manner. The large
style of the man, so magnificent and yet so modest, at once arrested
Thackeray's attention, and he forbore to place him in his extemporaneous
catalogue. I remember a pallid, sharp-faced girl fluttering past, and
how Thackeray exulted in the history of this "frail little bit of
porcelain," as he called her. There was something in her manner that
made him hate her, and he insisted she had murdered somebody on her way
to the hall. Altogether this marvellous prelude to the concert made a
deep impression on Thackeray's one listener, into whose ear he whispered
his fatal insinuations. There is one man still living and moving about
the streets I walk in occasionally, whom I never encounter without
almost a shudder, remembering as I do the unerring shaft which Thackeray
sent that night into the unknown man's character.
One day, many years ago, I saw him chaffing on the sidewalk in London,
in front of the Athenaeum Club, with a monstrous-sized, "copiously
ebriose" cabman, and I judged from the driver's ludicrously careful way
of landing the coin deep down in his breeches-pocket, that Thackeray had
given him a very unusual fare. "Who is your fat friend?" I asked,
crossing over to shake hands with him. "O, that indomitable youth is an
old crony of mine," he replied; and then, quoting Falstaff, "a goodly,
portly man, i' faith, and a corpulent, of a cheerful look, a pleasing
eye, and a most noble _carriage_." It was the _manner_ of saying this,
then, and there in the London street, the cabman moving slowly off on
his sorry vehicle, with one eye (an eye dewy with gin and water, and a
tear of gratitude, perhaps) on Thackeray, and the great man himself so
jovial and so full of kindness!
It was a treat to hear him, as I once did, discourse of Shakespeare's
probable life in Stratford among his neighbors. He painted, as he alone
could paint, the great poet sauntering about the lanes without the
slightest show of greatness, having a crack with the farmers, and in
very earnest talk about the crops. "I don't believe," said Thackeray,
"that these village cronies of his ever looked upon him as the mighty
poet,
'Sailing with supreme dominion
Through the azure deep of air,'
but simply as a wholesome, good-natured citizen, with whom it was always
pleasant to have a chat. I can see him now," continued Thackeray,
"leaning over a cottage gate, and tasting good Master Such-a-one's
home-brewed, and inquiring with a real interest after the mistress and
her children." Long before he put it into his lecture, I heard him say
in words to the same effect: "I should like to have been Shakespeare's
shoe-black, just to have lived in his house, just to have worshipped
him, to have run on his errands, and seen that sweet, serene face." To
have heard Thackeray depict, in his own charming manner, and at
considerable length, the imaginary walks and talks of Shakespeare, when
he would return to his home from occasional visits to London, pouring
into the ready ears of his unsophisticated friends and neighbors the
gossip from town which he thought would be likely to interest them, is
something to remember all one's days.
The enormous circulation achieved by the Cornhill Magazine, when it was
first started with Thackeray for its editor in chief, is a matter of
literary history. The announcement by his publishers that a sale of a
hundred and ten thousand of the first number had been reached made the
editor half delirious with joy, and he ran away to Paris to be rid of
the excitement for a few days. I met him by appointment at his hotel in
the Rue de la Paix, and found him wild with exultation and full of
enthusiasm for excellent George Smith, his publisher. "London," he
exclaimed, "is not big enough to contain me now, and I am obliged to add
Paris to my residence! Great heavens," said he, throwing up his long
arms, "where will this tremendous circulation stop! Who knows but that I
shall have to add Vienna and Rome to my whereabouts? If the worst comes
to the worst, New York, also, may fall into my clutches, and only the
Rocky Mountains may be able to stop my progress!" Those days in Paris
with him were simply tremendous. We dined at all possible and impossible
places together. We walked round and round the glittering court of the
Palais Royal, gazing in at the windows of the jewellers' shops, and all
my efforts were necessary to restrain him from rushing in and ordering a
pocketful of diamonds and "other trifles," as he called them; "for,"
said he, "how can I spend the princely income which Smith allows me for
editing the Cornhill, unless I begin instantly somewhere?" If he saw a
group of three or four persons talking together in an excited way, after
the manner of that then riant Parisian people, he would whisper to me
with immense gesticulation: "There, there, you see the news has reached
Paris, and perhaps the number has gone up since my last accounts from
London." His spirits during those few days were colossal, and he told me
that he found it impossible to sleep, "for counting up his subscribers."
I happened to know personally (and let me modestly add, with some degree
of sympathy) what he suffered editorially, when he had the charge and
responsibility of a magazine. With first-class contributors he got on
very well, he said, but the extortioners and revilers bothered the very
life out of him. He gave me some amusing accounts of his
misunderstandings with the "fair" (as he loved to call them), some of
whom followed him up so closely with their poetical compositions, that
his house (he was then living in Onslow Square) was never free of
interruption. "The darlings demanded," said he, "that I should re-write,
if I could not understand their ---- nonsense and put their halting
lines into proper form." "I was so appalled," said he, "when they set
upon me with their 'ipics and their ipecacs,' that you might have
knocked me down with a feather, sir. It was insupportable, and I fled
away into France." As he went on, waxing drolly furious at the
recollection of various editorial scenes, I could not help remembering
Mr. Yellowplush's recommendation, thus characteristically expressed:
"Take my advice, honrabble sir,--listen to a humble footmin: it's
genrally best in poatry to understand puffickly what you mean yourself,
and to igspress your meaning clearly afterwoods,--in the simpler words
the better, p'r'aps."
He took very great delight in his young daughter's first contributions
to the Cornhill, and I shall always remember how he made me get into a
cab, one day in London, that I might hear, as we rode along, the joyful
news he had to impart, that he had just been reading his daughter's
first paper, which was entitled "Little Scholars." "When I read it,"
said he, "I blubbered like a child, it is so good, so simple, and so
honest; and my little girl wrote it, every word of it."
During his second visit to Boston I was asked to invite him to attend an
evening meeting of a scientific club, which was to be held at the house
of a distinguished member. I was very reluctant to ask him to be
present, for I knew he could be easily bored, and I was fearful that a
prosy essay or geological speech might ensue, and I knew he would be
exasperated with me, even although I were the _innocent_ cause of his
affliction. My worst fears were realized. We had hardly got seated,
before a dull, bilious-looking old gentleman rose, and applied his auger
with such pertinacity that we were all bored nearly to distraction. I
dared not look at Thackeray, but I felt that his eye was upon me. My
distress may be imagined, when he got up quite deliberately from the
prominent place where a chair had been set for him, and made his exit
very noiselessly into a small anteroom leading into the larger room, and
in which no one was sitting. The small apartment was dimly lighted, but
he knew that I knew _he_ was there. Then commenced a series of
pantomimic feats impossible to describe adequately. He threw an
imaginary person (myself, of course) upon the floor, and proceeded to
stab him several times with a paper-folder, which he caught up for the
purpose. After disposing of his victim in this way, he was not
satisfied, for the dull lecture still went on in the other room, and he
fired an imaginary revolver several times at an imaginary head. Still,
the droning speaker proceeded with his frozen subject (it was something
about the Arctic regions, if I remember rightly), and now began the
greatest pantomimic scene of all, namely, murder by poison, after the
manner in which the player king is disposed of in Hamlet. Thackeray had
found a small vial on the mantel-shelf, and out of that he proceeded to
pour the imaginary "juice of cursed hebenon" into the imaginary porches
of somebody's ears. The whole thing was inimitably done, and I hoped
nobody saw it but myself; but years afterwards, a ponderous, fat-witted
young man put the question squarely to me: "What _was_ the matter with
Mr. Thackeray, that night the club met at Mr ----'s house?"
Overhearing me say one morning something about the vast attractions of
London to a greenhorn like myself, he broke in with, "Yes, but you have
not seen the grandest one yet! Go with me to-day to St. Paul's and hear
the charity children sing." So we went, and I saw the "head cynic of
literature," the "hater of humanity," as a critical dunce in the Times
once called him, hiding his bowed face, wet with tears, while his whole
frame shook with emotion, as the children of poverty rose to pour out
their anthems of praise. Afterwards he wrote in one of his books this
passage, which seems to me perfect in its feeling and tone:--
"And yet there is one day in the year when I think St. Paul's
presents the noblest sight in the whole world; when five thousand
charity children, with cheeks like nosegays, and sweet, fresh
voices, sing the hymn which makes every heart thrill with praise and
happiness. I have seen a hundred grand sights in the
world,--coronations, Parisian splendors, Crystal Palace openings,
Pope's chapels with their processions of long-tailed cardinals and
quavering choirs of fat soprani,--but think in all Christendom there
is no such sight as Charity Children's day. _Non Anglei, sed
angeli_. As one looks at that beautiful multitude of innocents; as
the first note strikes; indeed one may almost fancy that cherubs are
singing."
I parted with Thackeray for the last time in the street, at midnight, in
London, a few months before his death. The Cornhill Magazine, under his
editorship, having proved a very great success, grand dinners were given
every month in honor of the new venture. We had been sitting late at one
of these festivals, and, as it was getting toward morning, I thought it
wise, as far as I was concerned, to be moving homeward before the sun
rose. Seeing my intention to withdraw, he insisted on driving me in his
brougham to my lodgings. When we reached the outside door of our host,
Thackeray's servant, seeing a stranger with his master, touched his hat
and asked where he should drive us. It was then between one and two
o'clock,--time certainly for all decent diners out to be at rest.
Thackeray put on one of his most quizzical expressions, and said to
John, in answer to his question, "I think we will make a morning call on
the Lord Bishop of London." John knew his master's quips and cranks too
well to suppose he was in earnest, so I gave him my address, and we went
on. When we reached my lodgings the clocks were striking two, and the
early morning air was raw and piercing. Opposing all my entreaties for
leave-taking in the carriage, he insisted upon getting out on the
sidewalk and escorting me up to my door, saying, with a mock heroic
protest to the heavens above us, "That it would be shameful for a
full-blooded Britisher to leave an unprotected Yankee friend exposed to
ruffians, who prowl about the streets with an eye to plunder." Then
giving me a gigantic embrace, he sang a verse of which he knew me to be
very fond; and so vanished out of my sight the great-hearted author of
"Pendennis" and "Vanity Fair." But I think of him still as moving, in
his own stately way, up and down the crowded thoroughfares of London,
dropping in at the Garrick, or sitting at the window of the Athenaeum
Club, and watching the stupendous tide of life that is ever moving past
in that wonderful city.
Thackeray was a _master_ in every sense, having as it were, in himself,
a double quantity of being. Robust humor and lofty sentiment alternated
so strangely in him, that sometimes he seemed like the natural son of
Rabelais, and at others he rose up a very twin brother of the Stratford
Seer. There was nothing in him amorphous and unconsidered. Whatever he
chose to do was always perfectly done. There was a genuine Thackeray
flavor in everything he was willing to say or to write. He detected with
unfailing skill the good or the vile wherever it existed. He had an
unerring eye, a firm understanding, and abounding truth. "Two of his
great master powers," said the chairman at a dinner given to him many
years ago in Edinburgh, "are _satire_ and _sympathy_." George Brimley
remarked, "That he could not have painted Vanity Fair as he has, unless
Eden had been shining in his inner eye." He had, indeed, an awful
insight, with a world of solemn tenderness and simplicity, in his
composition. Those who heard the same voice that withered the memory of
King George the Fourth repeat "The spacious firmament on high" have a
recollection not easily to be blotted from the mind, and I have a kind
of pity for all who were born so recently as not to have heard and
understood Thackeray's Lectures. But they can read him, and I beg of
them to try and appreciate the tenderer phase of his genius, as well as
the sarcastic one. He teaches many lessons to young men, and here is one
of them, which I quote _memoriter_ from "Barry Lyndon": "Do you not, as
a boy, remember waking of bright summer mornings and finding your mother
looking over you? had not the gaze of her tender eyes stolen into your
senses long before you woke, and cast over your slumbering spirit a
sweet spell of peace, and love, and fresh-springing joy?" My dear
friend, John Brown, of Edinburgh (whom may God long preserve to both
countries where he is so loved and honored), chronicles this touching
incident. "We cannot resist here recalling one Sunday evening in
December, when Thackeray was walking with two friends along the Dean
Road, to the west of Edinburgh,--one of the noblest outlets to any city.
It was a lovely evening; such a sunset as one never forgets; a rich dark
bar of cloud hovered over the sun, going down behind the Highland hills,
lying bathed in amethystine bloom; between this cloud and the hills
there was a narrow slip of the pure ether, of a tender cowslip color,
lucid, and as if it were the very body of heaven in its clearness; every
object standing out as if etched upon the sky. The northwest end of
Corstorphine Hill, with its trees and rocks, lay in the heart of this
pure radiance; and there a wooden crane, used in the granary below, was
so placed as to assume the figure of a cross; there it was,
unmistakable, lifted up against the crystalline sky. All three gazed at
it silently. As they gazed, Thackeray gave utterance in a tremulous,
gentle, and rapid voice to what all were feeling, in the word,
'CALVARY!' The friends walked on in silence, and then turned to other
things. All that evening he was very gentle and serious, speaking, as he
seldom did, of divine things,--of death, of sin, of eternity, of
salvation, expressing his simple faith in God and in his Saviour."
Thackeray was found dead in his bed on Christmas morning, and he
probably died without pain. His mother and his daughters were sleeping
under the same roof when he passed away alone. Dickens told me that,
looking on him as he lay in his coffin, he wondered that the figure he
had known in life as one of such noble presence could seem so shrunken
and wasted; but there had been years of sorrow, years of labor, years of
pain, in that now exhausted life. It was his happiest Christmas morning
when he heard the Voice calling him homeward to unbroken rest.
HAWTHORNE.
* * * * *
_A hundred years ago Henry Vaughan seems almost to have anticipated
Hawthorne's appearance when he wrote that beautiful line,_
"_Feed on the vocal silence of his eye_."
III. HAWTHORNE.
I am sitting to-day opposite the likeness of the rarest genius America
has given to literature,--a man who lately sojourned in this busy world
of ours, but during many years of his life
"Wandered lonely as a cloud,"--
a man who had, so to speak, a physical affinity with solitude. The
writings of this author have never soiled the public mind with one
unlovely image. His men and women have a magic of their own, and we
shall wait a long time before another arises among us to take his place.
Indeed, it seems probable no one will ever walk precisely the same round
of fiction which he traversed with so free and firm a step.
The portrait I am looking at was made by Rowse (an exquisite drawing),
and is a very truthful representation of the head of Nathaniel
Hawthorne. He was several times painted and photographed, but it was
impossible for art to give the light and beauty of his wonderful eyes. I
remember to have heard, in the literary circles of Great Britain, that,
since Burns, no author had appeared there with a finer face than
Hawthorne's. Old Mrs. Basil Montagu told me, many years ago, that she
sat next to Burns at dinner, when he appeared in society in the first
flush of his fame, after the Edinburgh edition of his poems had been
published. She said, among other things, that, although the company
consisted of some of the best bred men of England, Burns seemed to her
the most perfect gentleman among them. She noticed, particularly, his
genuine grace and deferential manner toward women, and I was interested
to hear Mrs. Montagu's brilliant daughter, when speaking of Hawthorne's
advent in English society, describe him in almost the same terms as I
had heard her mother, years before, describe the Scottish poet. I
happened to be in London with Hawthorne during his consular residence in
England, and was always greatly delighted at the rustle of admiration
his personal appearance excited when he entered a room. His bearing was
modestly grand, and his voice touched the ear like a melody.
Here is a golden curl which adorned the head of Nathaniel Hawthorne when
he lay a little child in his cradle. It was given to me many years ago
by one near and dear to him. I have two other similar "blossoms," which
I keep pressed in the same book of remembrance. One is from the head of
John Keats, and was given to me by Charles Cowden Clarke, and the other
graced the head of Mary Mitford, and was sent to me after her death by
her friendly physician, who watched over her last hours. Leigh Hunt says
with a fine poetic emphasis,
"There seems a love in hair, though it be dead.
It is the gentlest, yet the strongest thread
Of our frail plant,--a blossom from the tree
Surviving the proud trunk;--as though it said,
Patience and Gentleness is Power. In me
Behold affectionate eternity."
There is a charming old lady, now living two doors from me, who dwelt in
Salem when Hawthorne was born, and, being his mother's neighbor at that
time (Mrs. Hawthorne then lived in Union Street), there came a message
to her intimating that the baby could be seen by calling. So my friend
tells me she went in, and saw the little winking thing in its mother's
arms. She is very clear as to the beauty of the infant, even when only a
week old, and remembers that "he was a pleasant child, quite handsome,
with golden curls." She also tells me that Hawthorne's mother was a
beautiful woman, with remarkable eyes, full of sensibility and
expression, and that she was a person of singular purity of mind.
Hawthorne's father, whom my friend knew well, she describes as a
warm-hearted and kindly man, very fond of children. He was somewhat
inclined to melancholy, and of a reticent disposition. He was a great
reader, employing all his leisure time at sea over books.
Hawthorne's father died when Nathaniel was four years old, and from that
time his uncle Robert Manning took charge of his education, sending him
to the best schools and afterwards to college. When the lad was about
nine years old, while playing bat and ball at school, he lamed his foot
so badly that he used two crutches for more than a year. His foot ceased
to grow like the other, and the doctors of the town were called in to
examine the little lame boy. He was not perfectly restored till he was
twelve years old. His kind-hearted schoolmaster, Joseph Worcester, the
author of the Dictionary, came every day to the house to hear the boy's
lessons, so that he did not fall behind in his studies. [There is a
tradition in the Manning family that Mr. Worcester was very much
interested in Maria Manning (a sister of Mrs. Hawthorne), who died in
1814, and that this was one reason of his attention to Nathaniel.] The
boy used to lie flat upon the carpet, and read and study the long days
through. Some time after he had recovered from this lameness he had an
illness causing him to lose the use of his limbs, and he was obliged to
seek again the aid of his old crutches, which were then pieced out at
the ends to make them longer. While a little child, and as soon almost
as he began to read, the authors he most delighted in were Shakespeare,
Milton, Pope, and Thomson. The "Castle of Indolence" was an especial
favorite with him during boyhood. The first book he bought with his own
money was a copy of Spenser's "Faery Queen."
One who watched him during his childhood tells me, that "when he was six
years old his favorite book was Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress': and that
whenever he went to visit his Grandmother Hawthorne, he used to take the
old family copy to a large chair in a corner of the room near a window,
and read it by the hour, without once speaking. No one ever thought of
asking how much of it he understood. I think it one of the happiest
circumstances of his training, that nothing was ever explained to him,
and that there was no professedly intellectual person in the family to
usurp the place of Providence and supplement its shortcomings, in order
to make him what he was never intended to be. His mind developed itself;
intentional cultivation might have spoiled it.... He used to invent long
stories, wild and fanciful, and tell where he was going when he grew up,
and of the wonderful adventures he was to meet with, always ending with,
'And I'm never coming back again,' in quite a solemn tone, that enjoined
upon us the advice to value him the more while he stayed with us."
When he could scarcely speak plain, it is recalled by members of the
family that the little fellow would go about the house, repeating with
vehement emphasis and gestures certain stagy lines from Shakespeare's
Richard III., which he had overheard from older persons about him. One
line, in particular, made a great impression upon him, and he would
start up on the most unexpected occasions and fire off in his loudest
tone,
"Stand back, my Lord, and let the coffin pass."
On the 21st of August, 1820, No. 1 of "The Spectator, edited by N.
Hathorne," neatly written in printed letters by the editor's own hand,
appeared. A prospectus was issued the week before, setting forth that
the paper would be published on Wednesdays, "price 12 cents per annum,
payment to be made at the end of the year." Among the advertisements is
the following:--
"Nathaniel Hathorne proposes to publish by subscription a NEW
EDITION of the MISERIES OF AUTHORS, to which will be added a SEQUEL,
containing FACTS and REMARKS drawn from his own experience."
Six numbers only were published. The following subjects were discussed
by young "Hathorne" in the Spectator,--"On Solitude," "The End of the
Year," "On Industry," "On Benevolence," "On Autumn," "On Wealth," "On
Hope," "On Courage." The poetry on the last page of each number was
evidently written by the editor, except in one instance, when an Address
to the Sun is signed by one of his sisters. In one of the numbers he
apologizes that no deaths of any importance have taken place in the
town. Under the head of Births, he gives the following news, "The lady
of Dr. Winthrop Brown, a son and heir. Mrs. Hathorne's cat, seven
kittens. We hear that both of the above ladies are in a state of
convalescence." One of the literary advertisements reads:--
"Blank Books made and for sale by N. Hathorne."
While Hawthorne was yet a little fellow the family moved to Raymond in
the State of Maine; here his out-of-door life did him great service, for
he grew tall and strong, and became a good shot and an excellent
fisherman. Here also his imagination was first stimulated, the wild
scenery and the primitive manners of the people contributing greatly to
awaken his thought. At seventeen he entered Bowdoin College, and after
his graduation returned again to live in Salem. During his youth he had
an impression that he would die before the age of twenty-five; but the
Mannings, his ever-watchful and kind relations, did everything possible
for the care of his health, and he was tided safely over the period when
he was most delicate. Professor Packard told me that when Hawthorne was
a student at Bowdoin in his freshman year, his Latin compositions showed
such facility that they attracted the special attention of those who
examined them. The Professor also remembers that Hawthorne's English
compositions elicited from Professor Newman (author of the work on
Rhetoric) high commendations.
When a youth Hawthorne made a journey into New Hampshire with his uncle,
Samuel Manning. They travelled in a two-wheeled chaise, and met with
many adventures which the young man chronicled in his home letters, Some
of the touches in these epistles were very characteristic and amusing,
and showed in those early years his quick observation and descriptive
power. The travellers "put up" at Farmington, in order to rest over
Sunday. Hawthorne writes to a member of the family in Salem: "As we were
wearied with rapid travelling, we found it impossible to attend divine
service, which was, of course, very grievous to us both. In the evening,
however, I went to a Bible class, with a very polite and agreeable
gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a strolling tailor, of
very questionable habits."
When the travellers arrived in the Shaker village of Canterbury,
Hawthorne at once made the acquaintance of the Community there, and the
account which he sent home was to the effect that the brothers and
sisters led a good and comfortable life, and he wrote: "If it were not
for the ridiculous ceremonies, a man might do a worse thing than to join
them." Indeed, he spoke to them about becoming a member of the Society,
and was evidently much impressed with the thrift and peace of the
establishment.
This visit in early life to the Shakers is interesting as suggesting to
Hawthorne his beautiful story of "The Canterbury Pilgrims," which is in
his volume of "The Snow-Image, and other Twice-Told Tales."
A lady of my acquaintance (the identical "Little Annie" of the "Ramble"
in "Twice-Told Tales") recalls the young man "when he returned home
after his collegiate studies." "He was even then," she says, "a most
noticeable person, never going into society, and deeply engaged in
reading everything he could lay his hands on. It was said in those days
that he had read every book in the Athenaeum Library in Salem." This
lady remembers that when she was a child, and before Hawthorne had
printed any of his stories, she used to sit on his knee and lean her
head on his shoulder, while by the hour he would fascinate her with
delightful legends, much more wonderful and beautiful than any she has
ever read since in printed books.
The traits of the Hawthorne character were stern probity and
truthfulness. Hawthorne's mother had many characteristics in common with
her distinguished son, she also being a reserved and thoughtful person.
Those who knew the family describe the son's affection for her as of the
deepest and tenderest nature, and they remember that when she died his
grief was almost insupportable. The anguish he suffered from her loss is
distinctly recalled by many persons still living, who visited the family
at that time in Salem.
I first saw Hawthorne when he was about thirty-five years old. He had
then published a collection of his sketches, the now famous "Twice-Told
Tales." Longfellow, ever alert for what is excellent, and eager to do a
brother author opportune and substantial service, at once came before
the public with a generous estimate of the work in the North American
Review; but the choice little volume, the most promising addition to
American literature that had appeared for many years, made little
impression on the public mind. Discerning readers, however, recognized
the supreme beauty in this new writer, and they never afterwards lost
sight of him.
In 1828 Hawthorne published a short anonymous romance called Fanshawe. I
once asked him about this disowned publication, and he spoke of it with
great disgust, and afterwards he thus referred to the subject in a
letter written to me in 1851: "You make an inquiry about some supposed
former publication of mine. I cannot be sworn to make correct answers as
to all the literary or other follies of my nonage; and I earnestly
recommend you not to brush away the dust that may have gathered over
them. Whatever might do me credit you may be pretty sure I should be
ready enough to bring forward. Anything else it is our mutual interest
to conceal; and so far from assisting your researches in that direction,
I especially enjoin it on you, my dear friend, not to read any
unacknowledged page that you may suppose to be mine."
When Mr. George Bancroft, then Collector of the Port of Boston,
appointed Hawthorne weigher and gauger in the custom-house, he did a
wise thing, for no public officer ever performed his disagreeable duties
better than our romancer. Here is a tattered little official document
signed by Hawthorne when he was watching over the interests of the
country: it certifies his attendance at the unlading of a brig, then
lying at Long Wharf in Boston. I keep this precious relic side by side
with one of a similar custom-house character, signed _Robert Burns_.
I came to know Hawthorne very intimately after the Whigs displaced the
Democratic romancer from office. In my ardent desire to have him
retained in the public service, his salary at that time being his sole
dependence,--not foreseeing that his withdrawal from that sort of
employment would be the best thing for American letters that could
possibly happen,--I called, in his behalf, on several influential
politicians of the day, and well remember the rebuffs I received in my
enthusiasm for the author of the "Twice-Told Tales." One pompous little
gentleman in authority, after hearing my appeal, quite astounded me by
his ignorance of the claims of a literary man on his country. "Yes,
yes," he sarcastically croaked down his public turtle-fed throat, "I see
through it all, I see through it; this Hawthorne is one of them 'ere
visionists, and we don't want no such a man as him round." So the
"visionist" was not allowed to remain in office, and the country was
better served by him in another way. In the winter of 1849, after he had
been ejected from the custom-house, I went down to Salem to see him and
inquire after his health, for we heard he had been suffering from
illness. He was then living in a modest wooden house in Mall Street, if
I remember rightly the location. I found him alone in a chamber over the
sitting-room of the dwelling; and as the day was cold, he was hovering
near a stove. We fell into talk about his future prospects, and he was,
as I feared I should find him, in a very desponding mood. "Now," said I,
"is the time for you to publish, for I know during these years in Salem
you must have got something ready for the press." "Nonsense," said he;
"what heart had I to write anything, when my publishers (M. and Company)
have been so many years trying to sell a small edition of the
'Twice-Told Tales'?" I still pressed upon him the good chances he would
have now with something new. "Who would risk publishing a book for _me_,
the most unpopular writer in America?" "I would," said I, "and would
start with an edition of two thousand copies of anything you write."
"What madness!" he exclaimed; "your friendship for me gets the better of
your judgment. No, no," he continued; "I have no money to indemnify a
publisher's losses on my account." I looked at my watch and found that
the train would soon be starting for Boston, and I knew there was not
much time to lose in trying to discover what had been his literary work
during these last few years in Salem. I remember that I pressed him to
reveal to me what he had been writing. He shook his head and gave me to
understand he had produced nothing. At that moment I caught sight of a
bureau or set of drawers near where we were sitting; and immediately it
occurred to me that hidden away somewhere in that article of furniture
was a story or stories by the author of the "Twice-Told Tales," and I
became so positive of it that I charged him vehemently with the fact. He
seemed surprised, I thought, but shook his head again; and I rose to
take my leave, begging him not to come into the cold entry, saying I
would come back and see him again in a few days. I was hurrying down the
stairs when he called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a
moment. Then quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of manuscript
in his hands, he said: "How in Heaven's name did you know this thing was
there? As you have found me out, take what I have written, and tell me,
after you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything.
It is either very good or very bad,--I don't know which." On my way up
to Boston I read the germ of "The Scarlet Letter"; before I slept that
night I wrote him a note all aglow with admiration of the marvellous
story he had put into my hands, and told him that I would come again to
Salem the next day and arrange for its publication. I went on in such an
amazing state of excitement when we met again in the little house, that
he would not believe I was really in earnest. He seemed to think I was
beside myself, and laughed sadly at my enthusiasm. However, we soon
arranged for his appearance again before the public with a book.
This quarto volume before me contains numerous letters, written by him
from 1850 down to the month of his death. The first one refers to "The
Scarlet Letter," and is dated in January, 1850. At my suggestion he had
altered the plan of that story. It was his intention to make "The
Scarlet Letter" one of several short stories, all to be included in one
volume, and to be called
OLD-TIME LEGENDS:
Together With Sketches,
EXPERIMENTAL AND IDEAL.
His first design was to make "The Scarlet Letter" occupy about two
hundred pages in his new book; but I persuaded him, after reading the
first chapters of the story, to elaborate it, and publish it as a
separate work. After it was settled that "The Scarlet Letter" should be
enlarged and printed by itself in a volume he wrote to me:--
"I am truly glad that you like the Introduction, for I was rather
afraid that it might appear absurd and impertinent to be talking
about myself, when nobody, that I know of, has requested any
information on that subject.
"As regards the size of the book, I have been thinking a good deal
about it. Considered merely as a matter of taste and beauty, the
form of publication which you recommend seems to me much preferable
to that of the 'Mosses.'
"In the present case, however, I have some doubts of the expediency,
because, if the book is made up entirely of 'The Scarlet Letter,' it
will be too sombre. I found it impossible to relieve the shadows of
the story with so much light as I would gladly have thrown in.
Keeping so close to its point as the tale does, and no otherwise
than by turning different sides of the same to the reader's eye, it
will weary very many people and disgust some. Is it safe, then, to
stake the fate of the book entirely on this one chance? A hunter
loads his gun with a bullet and several buckshot; and, following his
sagacious example, it was my purpose to conjoin the one long story
with half a dozen shorter ones, so that, failing to kill the public
outright with my biggest and heaviest lump of lead, I might have
other chances with the smaller bits, individually and in the
aggregate. However, I am willing to leave these considerations to
your judgment, and should not be sorry to have you decide for the
separate publication.
"In this latter event it appears to me that the only proper title
for the book would be 'The Scarlet Letter,' for 'The Custom-House'
is merely introductory,--an entrance-hall to the magnificent edifice
which I throw open to my guests. It would be funny if, seeing the
further passages so dark and dismal, they should all choose to stop
there! If 'The Scarlet Letter' is to be the title, would it not be
well to print it on the title-page in red ink? I am not quite sure
about the good taste of so doing, but it would certainly be piquant
and appropriate, and, I think, attractive to the great gull whom we
are endeavoring to circumvent."
One beautiful summer day, twenty years ago, I found Hawthorne in his
little red cottage at Lenox, surrounded by his happy young family. He
had the look, as somebody said, of a banished lord, and his grand figure
among the hills of Berkshire seemed finer than ever. His boy and girl
were swinging on the gate as we drove up to his door, and with their
sunny curls formed an attractive feature in the landscape. As the
afternoon was cool and delightful, we proposed a drive over to
Pittsfield to see Holmes, who was then living on his ancestral farm.
Hawthorne was in a cheerful condition, and seemed to enjoy the beauty of
the day to the utmost. Next morning we were all invited by Mr. Dudley
Field, then living at Stockbridge, to ascend Monument Mountain. Holmes,
Hawthorne, Duyckinck, Herman Melville, Headley, Sedgwick, Matthews, and
several ladies, were of the party. We scrambled to the top with great
spirit, and when we arrived, Melville, I remember, bestrode a peaked
rock, which ran out like a bowsprit, and pulled and hauled imaginary
ropes for our delectation. Then we all assembled in a shady spot, and
one of the party read to us Bryant's beautiful poem commemorating
Monument Mountain. Then we lunched among the rocks, and somebody
proposed Bryant's health, and "long life to the dear old poet." This was
the most popular toast of the day, and it took, I remember, a
considerable quantity of Heidsieck to do it justice. In the afternoon,
pioneered by Headley, we made our way, with merry shouts and laughter,
through the Ice-Glen. Hawthorne was among the most enterprising of the
merry-makers; and being in the dark much of the time, he ventured to
call out lustily and pretend that certain destruction was inevitable to
all of us. After this extemporaneous jollity, we dined together at Mr.
Dudley Field's in Stockbridge, and Hawthorne rayed out in a sparkling
and unwonted manner. I remember the conversation at table chiefly ran on
the physical differences between the present American and English men,
Hawthorne stoutly taking part in favor of the American. This 5th of
August was a happy day throughout, and I never saw Hawthorne in better
spirits.
Often and often I have seen him sitting in the chair I am now occupying
by the window, looking out into the twilight. He liked to watch the
vessels dropping down the stream, and nothing pleased him more than to
go on board a newly arrived bark from Down East, as she was just moored
at the wharf. One night we made the acquaintance of a cabin-boy on board
a brig, whom we found off duty and reading a large subscription volume,
which proved, on inquiry, to be a Commentary on the Bible. When
Hawthorne questioned him why he was reading, then and there, that
particular book, he replied with a knowing wink at both of us, "There's
consider'ble her'sy in our place, and I'm a studying up for 'em." He
liked on Sunday to mouse about among the books, and there are few
volumes in this room that he has not handled or read. He knew he could
have unmolested habitation here, whenever he chose to come, and he was
never allowed to be annoyed by intrusion of any kind. He always slept in
the same room,--the one looking on the water; and many a night I have
heard his solemn footsteps over my head, long after the rest of the
house had gone to sleep. Like many other nervous men of genius, he was a
light sleeper, and he liked to be up and about early; but it was only
for a ramble among the books again. One summer morning I found him as
early as four o'clock reading a favorite poem, on Solitude, a piece he
very much admired. That morning I shall not soon forget, for he was in
the vein for autobiographical talk, and he gave me a most interesting
account of his father, the sea-captain, who died of the yellow-fever in
Surinam in 1808, and of his beautiful mother, who dwelt a secluded
mourner ever after the death of her husband. Then he told stories of his
college life, and of his one sole intimate, Franklin Pierce, whom he
loved devotedly his life long.
In the early period of our acquaintance he much affected the old Boston
Exchange Coffee-House in Devonshire Street, and once I remember to have
found him shut up there before a blazing coal-fire, in the "tumultuous
privacy" of a great snow-storm, reading with apparent interest an
obsolete copy of the "Old Farmer's Almanac," which he had picked up
about the house. He also delighted in the Old Province House, at that
time an inn, kept by one Thomas Waite, whom he has immortalized. After
he was chosen a member of the Saturday Club he came frequently to dinner
with Felton, Longfellow, Holmes, and the rest of his friends, who
assembled once a month to dine together. At the table, on these
occasions, he was rather reticent than conversational, but when he
chose to talk it was observed that the best things said that day came
from him.
As I turn over his letters, the old days, delightful to recall, come
back again with added interest.
"I sha'n't have the new story," he says in one of them, dated from
Lenox on the 1st of October, 1850, "ready by November, for I am
never good for anything in the literary way till after the first
autumnal frost, which has somewhat such an effect on my imagination
that it does on the foliage here about me,--multiplying and
brightening its hues; though they are likely to be sober and shabby
enough after all.
"I am beginning to puzzle myself about a title for the book. The
scene of it is in one of those old projecting-stoned houses,
familiar to my eye in Salem; and the story, horrible to say, is a
little less than two hundred years long; though all but thirty or
forty pages of it refer to the present time. I think of such titles
as 'The House of the Seven Gables,' there being that number of
gable-ends to the old shanty; or 'The Seven-Gabled House'; or simply
'The Seven Gables.' Tell me how these strike you. It appears to me
that the latter is rather the best, and has the great advantage that
it would puzzle the Devil to tell what it means."
A month afterwards he writes further with regard to "The House of the
Seven Gables," concerning the title to which he was still in a
quandary:--
"'The Old Pyncheon House: A Romance'; 'The Old Pyncheon Family; or
the House of the Seven Gables: A Romance';--choose between them. I
have rather a distaste to a double title? otherwise, I think I
should prefer the second. Is it any matter under which title it is
announced? If a better should occur hereafter, we can substitute. Of
these two, on the whole, I judge the first to be the better.
"I write diligently, but not so rapidly as I had hoped. I find the
book requires more care and thought than 'The Scarlet Letter'; also
I have to wait oftener for a mood. 'The Scarlet Letter' being all in
one tone, I had only to get my pitch, and could then go on
interminably. Many passages of this book ought to be finished with
the minuteness of a Dutch picture, in order to give them their
proper effect. Sometimes, when tired of it, it strikes me that the
whole is an absurdity, from beginning to end; but the fact is, in
writing a romance, a man is always, or always ought to be, careering
on the utmost verge of a precipitous absurdity, and the skill lies
in coming as close as possible, without actually tumbling over. My
prevailing idea is, that the book ought to succeed better than 'The
Scarlet Letter,' though I have no idea that it will."
On the 9th of December he was still at work on the new romance, and
writes:--
"My desire and prayer is to get through with the business in hand. I
have been in a Slough of Despond for some days past, having written
so fiercely that I came to a stand-still. There are points where a
writer gets bewildered and cannot form any judgment of what he has
done, or tell what to do next. In these cases it is best to keep
quiet."
On the 12th of January, 1851, he is still busy over his new book, and
writes: "My 'House of the Seven Gables' is, so to speak, finished; only
I am hammering away a little on the roof, and doing up a few odd jobs,
that were left incomplete." At the end of the month the manuscript of
his second great romance was put into the hands of the expressman at
Lenox, by Hawthorne himself, to be delivered to me. On the 27th he
writes:--
"If you do not soon receive it, you may conclude that it has
miscarried; in which case, I shall not consent to the universe
existing a moment longer. I have no copy of it, except the wildest
scribble of a first draught, so that it could never be restored.
"It has met with extraordinary success from that portion of the
public to whose judgment it has been submitted, viz. from my wife. I
likewise prefer it to 'The Scarlet Letter'; but an author's opinion
of his book just after completing it is worth little or nothing, he
being then in the hot or cold fit of a fever, and certain to rate it
too high or too low.
"It has undoubtedly one disadvantage in being brought so close to
the present time; whereby its romantic improbabilities become more
glaring.
"I deem it indispensable that the proof-sheets should be sent me for
correction. It will cause some delay, no doubt, but probably not
much more than if I lived in Salem. At all events, I don't see how
it can be helped. My autography is sometimes villanously blind; and
it is odd enough that whenever the printers do mistake a word, it is
just the very jewel of a word, worth all the rest of the
dictionary."
I well remember with what anxiety I awaited the arrival of the
expressman with the precious parcel, and with what keen delight I read
every word of the new story before I slept. Here is the original
manuscript, just as it came that day, twenty years ago, fresh from the
author's hand. The printers carefully preserved it for me; and Hawthorne
once made a formal presentation of it, with great mock solemnity, in
this very room where I am now sitting.
After the book came out he wrote:--
"I have by no means an inconvenient multitude of friends; but if
they ever do appear a little too numerous, it is when I am making a
list of those to whom presentation copies are to be sent. Please
send one to General Pierce, Horatio Bridge, R.W. Emerson, W.E.
Channing, Longfellow, Hillard, Sumner, Holmes, Lowell, and Thompson
the artist. You will yourself give one to Whipple, whereby I shall
make a saving. I presume you won't put the portrait into the book.
It appears to me an improper accompaniment to a new work.
Nevertheless, if it be ready, I should be glad to have each of these
presentation copies accompanied by a copy of the engraving put
loosely between the leaves. Good by. I must now trudge two miles to
the village, through rain and mud knee-deep, after that accursed
proof-sheet. The book reads very well in proofs, but I don't believe
it will take like the former one. The preliminary chapter was what
gave 'The Scarlet Letter' its vogue."
The engraving he refers to in this letter was made from a portrait by
Mr. C.G. Thompson, and at that time, 1851, was an admirable likeness. On
the 6th of March he writes:--
"The package, with my five heads, arrived yesterday afternoon, and
we are truly obliged to you for putting so many at our disposal.
They are admirably done. The children recognized their venerable
sire with great delight. My wife complains somewhat of a want of
cheerfulness in the face; and, to say the truth, it does appear to
be with a bedevilled melancholy; but it will do all the better for
the author of 'The Scarlet Letter.' In the expression there is a
singular resemblance (which I do not remember in Thompson's picture)
to a miniature of my father."
His letters to me, during the summer of 1851, were frequent and
sometimes quite long. "The House of the Seven Gables" was warmly
welcomed, both at home and abroad. On the 23d of May he writes:--
"Whipple's notices have done more than pleased me, for they have
helped me to see my book. Much of the censure I recognize as just; I
wish I could feel the praise to be so fully deserved. Being better
(which I insist it is) than 'The Scarlet Letter,' I have never
expected it to be so popular (this steel pen makes me write
awfully). ---- ---- Esq., of Boston, has written to me, complaining
that I have made his grandfather infamous! It seems there was
actually a Pyncheon (or Pynchon, as he spells it) family resident in
Salem, and that their representative, at the period of the
Revolution, was a certain Judge Pynchon, a Tory and a refugee. This
was Mr. ----'s grandfather, and (at least, so he dutifully describes
him) the most exemplary old gentleman in the world. There are
several touches in my account of the Pyncheons which, he says, make
it probable that I had this actual family in my eye, and he
considers himself infinitely wronged and aggrieved, and thinks it
monstrous that the 'virtuous dead' cannot be suffered to rest
quietly in their graves. He further complains that I speak
disrespectfully of the ----'s in Grandfather's Chair. He writes more
in sorrow than in anger, though there is quite enough of the latter
quality to give piquancy to his epistle. The joke of the matter is,
that I never heard of his grandfather, nor knew that any Pyncheons
had ever lived in Salem, but took the name because it suited the
tone of my book, and was as much my property, for fictitious
purposes, as that of Smith. I have pacified him by a very polite and
gentlemanly letter, and if ever you publish any more of the Seven
Gables, I should like to write a brief preface, expressive of my
anguish for this unintentional wrong, and making the best reparation
possible else these wretched old Pyncheons will have no peace in the
other world, nor in this. Furthermore, there is a Rev. Mr. ----,
resident within four miles of me, and a cousin of Mr. ----, who
states that he likewise is highly indignant. Who would have dreamed
of claimants starting up for such an inheritance as the House of the
Seven Gables!
"I mean, to write, within six weeks or two months next ensuing, a
book of stories made up of classical myths. The subjects are: The
Story of Midas, with his Golden Touch, Pandora's Box, The Adventure
of Hercules in quest of the Golden Apples, Bellerophon and the
Chimera, Baucis and Philemon, Perseus and Medusa; these, I think,
will be enough to make up a volume. As a framework, I shall have a
young college student telling these stories to his cousins and
brothers and sisters, during his vacations, sometimes at the
fireside, sometimes in the woods and dells. Unless I greatly
mistake, these old fictions will work up admirably for the purpose;
and I shall aim at substituting a tone in some degree Gothic or
romantic, or any such tone as may best please myself, instead of the
classic coldness, which is as repellant as the touch of marble.
"I give you these hints of my plan, because you will perhaps think
it advisable to employ Billings to prepare some illustrations. There
is a good scope in the above subjects for fanciful designs.
Bellerophon and the Chimera, for instance: the Chimera a fantastic
monster with three heads, and Bellerophon fighting him, mounted on
Pegasus; Pandora opening the box; Hercules talking with Atlas, an
enormous giant who holds the sky on his shoulders, or sailing across
the sea in an immense bowl; Perseus transforming a king and all his
subjects to stone, by exhibiting the Gorgon's head. No particular
accuracy in costume need be aimed at. My stories will bear out the
artist in any liberties he may be inclined to take. Billings would
do these things well enough, though his characteristics are grace
and delicacy rather than wildness of fancy. The book, if it comes
out of my mind as I see it now, ought to have pretty wide success
amongst young people; and, of course, I shall purge out all the old
heathen wickedness, and put in a moral wherever practicable. For a
title how would this do: 'A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys'; or,
'The Wonder-Book of Old Stories'? I prefer the former. Or 'Myths
Modernized for my Children'; that won't do.
"I need a little change of scene, and meant to have come to Boston
and elsewhere before writing this book; but I cannot leave home at
present."
Throughout the summer Hawthorne was constantly worried by people who
insisted that they, or their families in the present or past
generations, had been deeply wronged in "The House of the Seven Gables."
In a note, received from him on the 5th of June, he says:--
"I have just received a letter from still another claimant of the
Pyncheon estate. I wonder if ever, and how soon, I shall get a just
estimate of how many jackasses there are in this ridiculous world.
My correspondent, by the way, estimates the number of these Pyncheon
jackasses at about twenty; I am doubtless to by remonstrated with by
each individual. After exchanging shots with all of them, I shall
get you to publish the whole correspondence, in a style to match
that of my other works, and I anticipate a great run for the volume.
"P.S. My last correspondent demands that another name be
substituted, instead of that of the family; to which I assent, in
case the publishers can be prevailed on to cancel the stereotype
plates. Of course you will consent! Pray do!"
Praise now poured in upon him from all quarters. Hosts of critics, both
in England and America, gallantly came forward to do him service, and
his fame was assured. On the 15th of July he sends me a jubilant letter
from Lenox, from which I will copy several passages:--
"Mrs. Kemble writes very good accounts from London of the reception
my two romances have met with there. She says they have made a
greater sensation than any book since 'Jane Eyre'; but probably she
is a little or a good deal too emphatic in her representation of the
matter. At any rate, she advises that the sheets of any future book
be sent to Moxon, and such an arrangement made that a copyright may
be secured in England as well as here. Could this be done with the
Wonder-Book? And do you think it would be worth while? I must see
the proof-sheets of this book. It is a cursed bore; for I want to be
done with it from this moment. Can't you arrange it so that two or
three or more sheets may be sent at once, on stated days, and so my
journeys to the village be fewer?
"That review which you sent me is a remarkable production. There is
praise enough to satisfy a greedier author than myself. I set it
aside, as not being able to estimate how far it is deserved. I can
better judge of the censure, much of which is undoubtedly just; and
I shall profit by it if I can. But, after all, there would be no
great use in attempting it. There are weeds enough in my mind, to be
sure, and I might pluck them up by the handful; but in so doing I
should root up the few flowers along with them. It is also to be
considered, that what one man calls weeds another classifies among
the choicest flowers in the garden. But this reviewer is certainly
a man of sense, and sometimes tickles me under the fifth rib. I beg
you to observe, however, that I do not acknowledge his justice in
cutting and slashing among the characters of the two books at the
rate he does; sparing nobody, I think, except Pearl and Phoebe. Yet
I think he is right as to my tendency as respects individual
character.
"I am going to begin to enjoy the summer now, and to read foolish
novels, if I can get any, and smoke cigars, and think of nothing at
all; which is equivalent to thinking of all manner of things."
The composition of the "Tanglewood Tales" gave him pleasant employment,
and all his letters, during the period he was writing them, overflow
with evidences of his felicitous mood. He requests that Billings should
pay especial attention to the drawings, and is anxious that the porch of
Tanglewood should be "well supplied with shrubbery." He seemed greatly
pleased that Mary Russell Mitford had fallen in with his books and had
written to me about them. "Her sketches," he said, "long ago as I read
them, are as sweet in my memory as the scent of new hay." On the 18th of
August he writes:--
"You are going to publish another thousand of the Seven Gables. I
promised those Pyncheons a preface. What if you insert the
following?
"(The author is pained to learn that, in selecting a name for the
fictitious inhabitants of a castle in the air, he has wounded the
feelings of more than one respectable descendant of an old Pyncheon
family. He begs leave to say that he intended no reference to any
individual of the name, now or heretofore extant; and further, that,
at the time of writing his book, he was wholly unaware of the
existence of such a family in New England for two hundred years
back, and that whatever he may have since learned of them is
altogether to their credit.)
"Insert it or not, as you like. I have done with the matter."
I advised him to let the Pyncheons rest as they were, and omit any
addition, either as note or preface, to the romance.
Near the close of 1851 his health seemed unsettled, and he asked me to
look over certain proofs "carefully," for he did not feel well enough
to manage them himself. In one of his notes, written from Lenox at that
time, he says:--
"Please God, I mean to look you in the face towards the end of next
week; at all events, within ten days. I have stayed here too long
and too constantly. To tell you a secret, I am sick to death of
Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here. But I
must. The air and climate do not agree with my health at all; and,
for the first time since I was a boy, I have felt languid and
dispirited during almost my whole residence here. O that Providence
would build me the merest little shanty, and mark me out a rood or
two of garden-ground, near the sea-coast. I thank you for the two
volumes of De Quincey. If it were not for your kindness in supplying
me with books now and then, I should quite forget how to read."
Hawthorne was a hearty devourer of books, and in certain moods of mind
it made very little difference what the volume before him happened to
be. An old play or an old newspaper sometimes gave him wondrous great
content, and he would ponder the sleepy, uninteresting sentences as if
they contained immortal mental aliment. He once told me he found such
delight in old advertisements in the newspapers at the Boston Athenaeum,
that he had passed delicious hours among them. At other times he was
very fastidious, and threw aside book after book until he found the
right one. De Quincey was a special favorite with him, and the Sermons
of Laurence Sterne he once commended to me as the best sermons ever
written. In his library was an early copy of Sir Philip Sidney's
"Arcadia," which had floated down to him from a remote ancestry, and
which he had read so industriously for forty years that it was nearly
worn out of its thick leathern cover. Hearing him say once that the old
English State Trials were enchanting reading, and knowing that he did
not possess a copy of those heavy folios, I picked up a set one day in a
bookshop and sent them to him. He often told me that he spent more
hours over them and got more delectation out of them than tongue could
tell, and he said, if five lives were vouchsafed to him, he could employ
them all in writing stories out of those books. He had sketched, in his
mind, several romances founded on the remarkable trials reported in the
ancient volumes; and one day, I remember, he made my blood tingle by
relating some of the situations he intended, if his life was spared, to
weave into future romances. Sir Walter Scott's novels he continued
almost to worship, and was accustomed to read them aloud in his family.
The novels of G.P.R. James, both the early and the later ones, he
insisted were admirable stories, admirably told, and he had high praise
to bestow on the works of Anthony Trollope. "Have you ever read these
novels?" he wrote to me in a letter from England, some time before
Trollope began to be much known in America. "They precisely suit my
taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and
through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had
hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with
all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting
that they were made a show of. And these books are as English as a
beefsteak. Have they ever been tried in America? It needs an English
residence to make them thoroughly comprehensible; but still I should
think that the human nature in them would give them success anywhere."
I have often been asked if all his moods were sombre, and if he was
never jolly sometimes like other people. Indeed he was; and although the
humorous side of Hawthorne was not easily or often discoverable, yet
have I seen him marvellously moved to fun, and no man laughed more
heartily in his way over a good story. Wise and witty H----, in whom
wisdom and wit are so ingrained that age only increases his subtile
spirit, and greatly enhances the power of his cheerful temperament,
always had the talismanic faculty of breaking up that thoughtfully sad
face into mirthful waves; and I remember how Hawthorne writhed with
hilarious delight over Professor L----'s account of a butcher who
remarked that "Idees had got afloat in the public mind with respect to
sassingers." I once told him of a young woman who brought in a
manuscript, and said, as she placed it in my hands, "I don't know what
to do with myself sometimes, I'm so filled with _mammoth thoughts_." A
series of convulsive efforts to suppress explosive laughter followed,
which I remember to this day.
He had an inexhaustible store of amusing anecdotes to relate of people
and things he had observed on the road. One day he described to me, in
his inimitable and quietly ludicrous manner, being _watched_, while on a
visit to a distant city, by a friend who called, and thought he needed a
protector, his health being at that time not so good as usual. "He stuck
by me," said Hawthorne, "as if he were afraid to leave me alone; he
stayed past the dinner hour, and when I began to wonder if he never took
meals himself, he departed and set another man to _watch_ me till he
should return. That man _watched_ me so, in his unwearying kindness,
that when I left the house I forgot half my luggage, and left behind,
among other things, a beautiful pair of slippers. They _watched_ me so,
among them, I swear to you I forgot nearly everything I owned."
* * * * *
Hawthorne is still looking at me in his far-seeing way, as if he were
pondering what was next to be said about him. It would not displease
him, I know, if I were to begin my discursive talk to-day by telling a
little incident connected with a famous American poem.
Hawthorne dined one day with Longfellow, and brought with him a friend
from Salem. After dinner the friend said: "I have been trying to
persuade Hawthorne to write a story, based upon a legend of Acadie, and
still current there; a legend of a girl who, in the dispersion of the
Acadians, was separated from her lover, and passed her life in waiting
and seeking for him, and only found him dying in a hospital, when both
were old." Longfellow wondered that this legend did not strike the fancy
of Hawthorne, and said to him: "If you have really made up your mind not
to use it for a story, will you give it to me for a poem?" To this
Hawthorne assented, and moreover promised not to treat the subject in
prose till Longfellow had seen what he could do with it in verse. And so
we have "Evangeline" in beautiful hexameters, --a poem that will hold
its place in literature while true affection lasts. Hawthorne rejoiced
in this great success of Longfellow, and loved to count up the editions,
both foreign and American, of this now world-renowned poem.
I have lately met an early friend of Hawthorne's, older than himself,
who knew him intimately all his life long, and I have learned some
additional facts about his youthful days. Soon after he left college he
wrote some stories which he called "Seven Tales of my Native Land." The
motto which he chose for the title-page was "We are Seven," from
Wordsworth. My informant read the tales in manuscript, and says some of
them were very striking, particularly one or two Witch Stories. As soon
as the little book was well prepared for the press he deliberately threw
it into the fire, and sat by to see its destruction.
When about fourteen he wrote out for a member of his family a list of
the books he had at that time been reading. The catalogue was a long
one, but my informant remembers that The Waverley Novels, Rousseau's
Works, and The Newgate Calender were among them. Serious remonstrances
were made by the family touching the perusal of this last work, but he
persisted in going through it to the end. He had an objection in his
boyhood to reading much that was called "true and useful." Of history in
general he was not very fond, but he read Froissart with interest, and
Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. He is remembered to have said at
that time "he cared very little for the history of the world before the
fourteenth century." After he left college he read a great deal of
French literature, especially the works of Voltaire and his
contemporaries. He rarely went into the streets during the daytime,
unless there was to be a gathering of the people for some public
purpose, such as a political meeting, a military muster, or a fire. A
great conflagration attracted him in a peculiar manner, and he is
remembered, while a young man in Salem, to have been often seen looking
on, from some dark corner, while the fire was raging. When General
Jackson, of whom he professed himself a partisan, visited Salem in 1833,
he walked out to the boundary of the town to meet him,--not to speak to
him, but only to look at him. When he came home at night he said he
found only a few men and boys collected, not enough people, without the
assistance he rendered, to welcome the General with a good cheer. It is
said that Susan, in the "Village Uncle," one of the "Twice-Told Tales,"
is not altogether a creation of his fancy. Her father was a fisherman
living in Salem, and Hawthorne was constantly telling the members of his
family how charming she was, and he always spoke of her as his
"mermaid." He said she had a great deal of what the French call
_espièglerie_. There was another young beauty, living at that time in
his native town, quite captivating to him, though in a different style
from the mermaid. But if his head and heart were turned in his youth by
these two nymphs in his native town, there was soon a transfer of his
affections to quite another direction. His new passion was a much more
permanent one, for now there dawned upon him so perfect a creature that
he fell in love irrevocably; all his thoughts and all his delights
centred in her, who suddenly became indeed the mistress of his soul. She
filled the measure of his being, and became a part and parcel of his
life. Who was this mysterious young person that had crossed his
boyhood's path and made him hers forever? Whose daughter was she that
could thus enthrall the ardent young man in Salem, who knew as yet so
little of the world and its sirens? She is described by one who met her
long before Hawthorne made her acquaintance as "the prettiest low-born
lass that ever ran on the greensward," and she must have been a radiant
child of beauty, indeed, that girl! She danced like a fairy, she sang
exquisitely, so that every one who knew her seemed amazed at her perfect
way of doing everything she attempted. Who was it that thus summoned all
this witchery, making such a tumult in young Hawthorne's bosom? She was
"daughter to Leontes and Hermione," king and queen of Sicilia, and her
name was Perdita! It was Shakespeare who introduced Hawthorne to his
first real love, and the lover never forgot his mistress. He was
constant ever, and worshipped her through life. Beauty always captivated
him. Where there was beauty he fancied other good gifts must naturally
be in possession. During his childhood homeliness was always repulsive
to him. When a little boy he is remembered to have said to a woman who
wished to be kind to him, "Take her away! She is ugly and fat, and has a
loud voice."
When quite a young man he applied for a situation under Commodore Wilkes
on the Exploring Expedition, but did not succeed in obtaining an
appointment. He thought this a great misfortune, as he was fond of
travel, and he promised to do all sorts of wonderful things, should he
be allowed to join the voyagers.
One very odd but characteristic notion of his, when a youth, was, that
he should like a competent income which should neither increase nor
diminish, for then, he said, it would not engross too much of his
attention. Surrey's little poem, "The Means to obtain a Happy Life,"
expressed exactly what his idea of happiness was when a lad. When a
school-boy he wrote verses for the newspapers, but he ignored their
existence in after years with a smile of droll disgust. One of his
quatrains lives in the memory of a friend, who repeated it to me
recently:--
"The ocean hath its silent caves,
Deep, quiet, and alone;
Above them there are troubled waves,
Beneath them there are none."
When the Atlantic Cable was first laid, somebody, not knowing the author
of the lines, quoted them to Hawthorne as applicable to the calmness
said to exist in the depths of the ocean. He listened to the verse, and
then laughingly observed, "I know something of the deep sea myself."
In 1836 he went to Boston, I am told, to edit the "American Magazine of
Useful Knowledge," for which he was to be paid a salary of six hundred
dollars a year. The proprietors soon became insolvent, so that he
received nothing, but he kept on just the same as if he had been paid
regularly. The plan of the work proposed by the publishers of the
magazine admitted no fiction into its pages. The magazine was printed on
coarse paper and was illustrated by engravings painful to look at. There
were no contributors except the editor, and he wrote the whole of every
number. Short biographical sketches of eminent men and historical
narratives filled up its pages. I have examined the columns of this
deceased magazine, and read Hawthorne's narrative of Mrs. Dustan's
captivity. Mrs. Dustan was carried off by the Indians from Haverhill,
and Hawthorne does not much commiserate the hardships she endured, but
reserves his sympathy for her husband, who was _not_ carried into
captivity, and suffered nothing from the Indians, but who, he says, was
a tenderhearted man, and took care of the children during Mrs. D.'s
absence from home, and probably knew that his wife would be more than a
match for a whole tribe of savages.
When the Rev. Mr. Cheever was knocked down and flogged in the streets of
Salem and then imprisoned, Hawthorne came out of his retreat and visited
him regularly in jail, showing strong sympathy for the man and great
indignation for those who had maltreated him.
Those early days in Salem,--how interesting the memory of them must be
to the friends who knew and followed the gentle dreamer in his budding
career! When the whisper first came to the timid boy, in that "dismal
chamber in Union Street," that he too possessed the soul of an artist,
there were not many about him to share the divine rapture that must have
filled his proud young heart. Outside of his own little family circle,
doubting and desponding eyes looked upon him, and many a stupid head
wagged in derision as he passed by. But there was always waiting for him
a sweet and honest welcome by the pleasant hearth where his mother and
sisters sat and listened to the beautiful creations of his fresh and
glowing fancy. We can imagine the happy group gathered around the
evening lamp! "Well, my son," says the fond mother, looking up from her
knitting-work, "what have you got for us to-night? It is some time since
you read us a story, and your sisters are as impatient as I am to have a
new one." And then we can hear, or think we hear, the young man begin in
a low and modest tone the story of "Edward Fane's Rosebud," or "The
Seven Vagabonds," or perchance (O tearful, happy evening!) that tender
idyl of "The Gentle Boy!" What a privilege to hear for the first time a
"Twice-Told Tale," before it was even _once_ told to the public! And I
know with what rapture the delighted little audience must have hailed
the advent of every fresh indication that genius, so seldom a visitant
at any fireside, had come down so noiselessly to bless their quiet
hearthstone in the sombre old town. In striking contrast to Hawthorne's
audience nightly convened to listen while he read his charming tales and
essays, I think of poor Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, facing those
hard-eyed critics at the house of Madame Neckar, when as a young man and
entirely unknown he essayed to read his then unpublished story of "Paul
and Virginia." The story was simple and the voice of the poor and
nameless reader trembled. Everybody was unsympathetic and gaped, and at
the end of a quarter of an hour Monsieur de Buffon, who always had a
loud way with him, cried out to Madame Neckar's servant, "Let the horses
be put to my carriage!"
Hawthorne seems never to have known that raw period in authorship which
is common to most growing writers, when the style is "overlanguaged,"
and when it plunges wildly through the "sandy deserts of rhetoric," or
struggles as if it were having a personal difficulty with Ignorance and
his brother Platitude. It was capitally said of Chateaubriand that "he
lived on the summits of syllables," and of another young author that "he
was so dully good, that he made even virtue disreputable." Hawthorne had
no such literary vices to contend with. His looks seemed from the start
to be
"Commercing with the skies,"
and he marching upward to the goal without impediment. I was struck a
few days ago with the untruth, so far as Hawthorne is concerned, of a
passage in the Preface to Endymion. Keats says: "The imagination of a
boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but
there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the
character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition
thick-sighted." Hawthorne's imagination had no middle period of
decadence or doubt, but continued, as it began, in full vigor to the
end.
* * * * *
In 1852 I went to Europe, and while absent had frequent most welcome
letters from the delightful dreamer. He had finished the "Blithedale
Romance" during my wanderings, and I was fortunate enough to arrange for
its publication in London simultaneously with its appearance in Boston.
One of his letters (dated from his new residence in Concord, June 17,
1852) runs thus:--
"You have succeeded admirably in regard to the 'Blithedale Romance,'
and have got £150 more than I expected to receive. It will come in
good time, too; for my drafts have been pretty heavy of late, in
consequence of buying an estate!!! and fitting up my house. What a
truant you are from the Corner! I wish, before leaving London, you
would obtain for me copies of any English editions of my writings
not already in my possession. I have Routledge's edition of 'The
Scarlet Letter,' the 'Mosses,' and 'Twice-Told Tales'; Bohn's
editions of 'The House of the Seven Gables,' the 'Snow-Image' and
the 'Wonder-Book,' and Bogue's edition of 'The Scarlet
Letter';--these are all, and I should be glad of the rest. I meant
to have written another 'Wonder-Book' this summer, but another task
has unexpectedly intervened. General Pierce of New Hampshire, the
Democratic nominee for the Presidency, was a college friend of mine,
as you know, and we have been intimate through life. He wishes me to
write his biography, and I have consented to do so; somewhat
reluctantly, however, for Pierce has now reached that altitude when
a man, careful of his personal dignity, will begin to think of
cutting his acquaintance. But I seek nothing from him, and therefore
need not be ashamed to tell the truth of an old friend.... I have
written to Barry Cornwall, and shall probably enclose the letter
along with this. I don't more than half believe what you tell me of
my reputation in England, and am only so far credulous on the
strength of the £200, and shall have a somewhat stronger sense of
this latter reality when I finger the cash. Do come home in season
to preside over the publication of the Romance."
He had christened his estate The Wayside, and in a postscript to the
above letter he begs me to consider the name and tell him how I like it.
Another letter, evidently foreshadowing a foreign appointment from the
newly elected President, contains this passage:--
"Do make some inquiries about Portugal; as, for instance, in what
part of the world it lies, and whether it is an empire, a kingdom,
or a republic. Also, and more particularly, the expenses of living
there, and whether the Minister would be likely to be much pestered
with his own countrymen. Also, any other information about foreign
countries would be acceptable to an inquiring mind."
When I returned from abroad I found him getting matters in readiness to
leave the country for a consulship in Liverpool. He seemed happy at the
thought of flitting, but I wondered if he could possibly be as contented
across the water as he was in Concord. I remember walking with him to
the Old Manse, a mile or so distant from The Wayside, his new residence,
and talking over England and his proposed absence of several years. We
strolled round the house, where he spent the first years of his married
life, and he pointed from the outside to the windows, out of which he
had looked and seen supernatural and other visions. We walked up and
down the avenue, the memory of which he has embalmed in the "Mosses,"
and he discoursed most pleasantly of all that had befallen him since he
led a lonely, secluded life in Salem. It was a sleepy, warm afternoon,
and he proposed that we should wander up the banks of the river and lie
down and watch the clouds float above and in the quiet stream. I recall
his lounging, easy air as he tolled me along until we came to a spot
secluded, and ofttimes sacred to his wayward thoughts. He bade me lie
down on the grass and hear the birds sing. As we steeped ourselves in
the delicious idleness, he began to murmur some half-forgotten lines
from Thomson's "Seasons," which he said had been favorites of his from
boyhood. While we lay there, hidden in the grass, we heard approaching
footsteps, and Hawthorne hurriedly whispered, "Duck! or we shall be
interrupted by somebody." The solemnity of his manner, and the thought
of the down-flat position in which we had both placed ourselves to avoid
being seen, threw me into a foolish, semi-hysterical fit of laughter,
and when he nudged me, and again whispered more lugubriously than ever,
"Heaven help me, Mr. ---- is close upon us!" I felt convinced that if
the thing went further, suffocation, in my case at least, must ensue.
He kept me constantly informed, after he went to Liverpool, of how he
was passing his time; and his charming "English Note-Books" reveal the
fact that he was never idle. There were touches, however, in his private
letters which escaped daily record in his journal, and I remember how
delightful it was, after he landed in Europe, to get his frequent
missives. In one of the first he gives me an account of a dinner where
he was obliged to make a speech. He says:--
"I tickled up John Bull's self-conceit (which is very easily done)
with a few sentences of most outrageous flattery, and sat down in a
general puddle of good feeling." In another he says: "I have taken a
house in Rock Park, on the Cheshire side of the Mersey, and am as
snug as a bug in a rug. Next year you must come and see how I live.
Give my regards to everybody, and my love to half a dozen.... I wish
you would call on Mr. Savage, the antiquarian, if you know him, and
ask whether he can inform me what part of England the original
William Hawthorne came from. He came over, I think in 1634.... It
would really be a great obligation if he could answer the above
query. Or, if the fact is not within his own knowledge, he might
perhaps indicate some place where such information might be obtained
here in England. I presume there are records still extant somewhere
of all the passengers by those early ships, with their English
localities annexed to their names. Of all things, I should like to
find a gravestone in one of these old churchyards with my own name
upon it, although, for myself, I should wish to be buried in
America. The graves are too horribly damp here."
The hedgerows of England, the grassy meadows, and the picturesque old
cottages delighted him, and he was never tired of writing to me about
them. While wandering over the country, he was often deeply touched by
meeting among the wild-flowers many of his old New England
favorites,--bluebells, crocuses, primroses, foxglove, and other flowers
which are cultivated in out gardens, and which had long been familiar to
him in America.
I can imagine him, in his quiet, musing way, strolling through the
daisied fields on a Sunday morning and hearing the distant church-bells
chiming to service. His religion was deep and broad, but it was irksome
for him to be fastened in by a pew-door, and I doubt if he often heard
an English sermon. He very rarely described himself as _inside_ a
church, but he liked to wander among the graves in the churchyards and
read the epitaphs on the moss-grown slabs. He liked better to meet and
have a talk with the _sexton_ than with the _rector_.
He was constantly demanding longer letters from home; and nothing gave
him more pleasure than, monthly news from "The Saturday Club," and
detailed accounts of what was going forward in literature. One of his
letters dated in January, 1854, starts off thus:--
"I wish your epistolary propensities were stronger than they are.
All your letters to me since I left America might be squeezed into
one.... I send Ticknor a big cheese, which I long ago promised him,
and my advice is, that he keep it in the shop, and daily, between
eleven and one o'clock, distribute slices of it to your half-starved
authors, together with crackers and something to drink.... I thank
you for the books you send me, and more especially for Mrs. Mowatt's
Autobiography, which seems to me an admirable book. Of all things I
delight in autobiographies; and I hardly ever read one that
interested me so much. She must be a remarkable woman, and I cannot
but lament my ill fortune in never having seen her on the stage or
elsewhere.... I count strongly upon your promise to be with us in
May. Can't you bring Whipple with you?"
One of his favorite resorts in Liverpool was the boarding-house of good
Mrs. Blodgett, in Duke Street, a house where many Americans have found
delectable quarters, after being tossed on the stormy Atlantic. "I have
never known a better woman," Hawthorne used to say, "and her motherly
kindness to me and mine I can never forget." Hundreds of American
travellers will bear witness to the excellence of that beautiful old
lady, who presided with such dignity and sweetness over her hospitable
mansion.
On the 13th of April, 1854, Hawthorne wrote to me this characteristic
letter from the consular office in Liverpool:--
"I am very glad that the 'Mosses' have come into the hands of our
firm; and I return the copy sent me, after a careful revision. When
I wrote those dreamy sketches, I little thought that I should ever
preface an edition for the press amidst the bustling life of a
Liverpool consulate. Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I
entirely comprehend my own meaning, in some of these blasted
allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning, or at least
thought I had. I am a good deal changed since those times; and, to
tell you the truth, my past self is not very much to my taste, as I
see myself in this book. Yet certainly there is more in it than the
public generally gave me credit for at the time it was written.
"But I don't think myself worthy of very much more credit than I
got. It has been a very disagreeable task to read the book. The
story of 'Rappacini's Daughter' was published in the Democratic
Review, about the year 1844; and it was prefaced by some remarks on
the celebrated French author (a certain M. de l'Aubépine), from
whose works it was translated. I left out this preface when the
story was republished; but I wish you would turn to it in the
Democratic, and see whether it is worth while to insert it in the
new edition. I leave it altogether to your judgment.
"A young poet named ---- has called on me, and has sent me some
copies of his works to be transmitted to America. It seems to me
there is good in him; and he is recognized by Tennyson, by Carlyle,
by Kingsley, and others of the best people here. He writes me that
this edition of his poems is nearly exhausted, and that Routledge is
going to publish another enlarged and in better style.
"Perhaps it might be well for you to take him up in America. At all
events, try to bring him into notice; and some day or other you may
be glad to have helped a famous poet in his obscurity. The poor
fellow has left a good post in the customs to cultivate literature
in London!
"We shall begin to look for you now by every steamer from Boston.
You must make up your mind to spend a good while with us before
going to see your London friends.
"Did you read the article on your friend De Quincey in the last
Westminster? It was written by Mr. ---- of this city, who was in
America a year or two ago. The article is pretty well, but does
nothing like adequate justice to De Quincey; and in fact no
Englishman cares a pin for him. We are ten times as good readers and
critics as they.
"Is not Whipple coming here soon?"
Hawthorne's first visit to London afforded him great pleasure, but he
kept out of the way of literary people as much as possible. He
introduced himself to nobody, except Mr. ----, whose assistance he
needed, in order to be identified at the bank. He wrote to me from 24
George Street, Hanover Square, and told me he delighted in London, and
wished he could spend a year there. He enjoyed floating about, in a sort
of unknown way, among the rotund and rubicund figures made jolly with
ale and port-wine. He was greatly amused at being told (his informants
meaning to be complimentary) "that he would never be taken for anything
but an Englishman." He called Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade,"
just printed at that time, "a broken-kneed gallop of a poem." He
writes:--
"John Bull is in high spirits just now at the taking of Sebastopol.
What an absurd personage John is! I find that my liking for him
grows stronger the more I see of him, but that my admiration and
respect have constantly decreased."
One of his most intimate friends (a man unlike that individual of whom
it was said that he was the friend of everybody that did not need a
friend) was Francis Bennoch, a merchant of Wood Street, Cheapside,
London, the gentleman to whom Mrs. Hawthorne dedicated the English
Note-Books. Hawthorne's letters abounded in warm expressions of
affection for the man whose noble hospitality and deep interest made his
residence in England full of happiness. Bennoch was indeed like a
brother to him, sympathizing warmly in all his literary projects, and
giving him the benefit of his excellent judgment while he was sojourning
among strangers. Bennoch's record may be found in Tom Taylor's admirable
life of poor Haydon, the artist. All literary and artistic people who
have had the good fortune to enjoy his friendship have loved him. I
happen to know of his bountiful kindness to Miss Mitford and Hawthorne
and poor old Jerdan, for these hospitalities happened in my time; but he
began to befriend all who needed friendship long before I knew him. His
name ought never to be omitted from the literary annals of England; nor
that of his wife either, for she has always made her delightful fireside
warm and comforting to her husband's friends.
Many and many a happy time Bennoch, Hawthorne, and myself have had
together on British soil. I remember we went once to dine at a great
house in the country, years ago, where it was understood there would be
no dinner speeches. The banquet was in honor of some society,--I have
quite forgotten what,--but it was a jocose and not a serious club. The
gentleman who gave it, Sir ----, was a most kind and genial person, and
gathered about him on this occasion some of the brightest and best from
London. All the way down in the train Hawthorne was rejoicing that this
was to be a dinner without speech-making; "for," said he, "nothing would
tempt me to go if toasts and such confounded deviltry were to be the
order of the day." So we rattled along, without a fear of any impending
cloud of oratory. The entertainment was a most exquisite one, about
twenty gentlemen sitting down at the beautifully ornamented table.
Hawthorne was in uncommonly good spirits, and, having the seat of honor
at the right of his host, was pretty keenly scrutinized by his British
brethren of the quill. He had, of course, banished all thought of
speech-making, and his knees never smote together once, as he told me
afterwards. But it became evident to my mind that Hawthorne's health was
to be proposed with all the honors. I glanced at him across the table,
and saw that he was unsuspicious of any movement against his quiet
serenity. Suddenly and without warning our host rapped the mahogany, and
began a set speech of welcome to the "distinguished American romancer."
It was a very honest and a very hearty speech, but I dared not look at
Hawthorne. I expected every moment to see him glide out of the room, or
sink down out of sight from his chair. The tortures I suffered on
Hawthorne's account, on that occasion, I will not attempt to describe
now. I knew nothing would have induced the shy man of letters to go down
to Brighton, if he had known he was to be spoken at in that manner. I
imagined his face a deep crimson, and his hands trembling with nervous
horror; but judge of my surprise, when he rose to reply with so calm a
voice and so composed a manner, that, in all my experience of
dinner-speaking, I never witnessed such a case of apparent ease.
(Easy-Chair C ---- himself, one of the best makers of after-dinner or
any other speeches of our day, according to Charles Dickens,--no
inadequate judge, all will allow,--never surpassed in eloquent effect
this speech by Hawthorne.) There was no hesitation, no sign of lack of
preparation, but he went on for about ten minutes in such a masterly
manner, that I declare it was one of the most successful efforts of the
kind ever made. Everybody was delighted, and, when he sat down, a wild
and unanimous shout of applause rattled the glasses on the table. The
meaning of his singular composure on that occasion I could never get him
satisfactorily to explain, and the only remark I ever heard him make, in
any way connected with this marvellous exhibition of coolness, was
simply, "What a confounded fool I was to go down to that speech-making
dinner!"
During all those long years, while Hawthorne was absent in Europe, he
was anything but an idle man. On the contrary, he was an eminently busy
one, in the best sense of that term; and if his life had been prolonged,
the public would have been a rich gainer for his residence abroad. His
brain teemed with romances, and once I remember he told me he had no
less than five stories, well thought out, any one of which he could
finish and publish whenever he chose to. There was one subject for a
work of imagination that seems to have haunted him for years, and he has
mentioned it twice in his journal. This was the subsequent life of the
young man whom Jesus, looking on, "loved," and whom he bade to sell all
that he had and give to the poor, and take up his cross and follow him.
"Something very deep and beautiful might be made out of this," Hawthorne
said, "for the young man went away sorrowful, and is not recorded to
have done what he was bidden to do."
One of the most difficult matters he had to manage while in England was
the publication of Miss Bacon's singular book on Shakespeare. The poor
lady, after he had agreed to see the work through the press, broke off
all correspondence with him in a storm of wrath, accusing him of
pusillanimity in not avowing full faith in her theory; so that, as he
told me, so far as her good-will was concerned, he had not gained much
by taking the responsibility of her book upon his shoulders. It was a
heavy weight for him to bear in more senses than one, for he paid out of
his own pocket the expenses of publication.
I find in his letters constant references to the kindness with which he
was treated in London. He spoke of Mrs. S.C. Hall as "one of the best
and warmest-hearted women in the world." Leigh Hunt, in his way, pleased
and satisfied him more than almost any man he had seen in England. "As
for other literary men," he says in one of his letters, "I doubt whether
London can muster so good a dinner-party as that which assembles every
month at the marble palace in School Street."
All sorts of adventures befell him during his stay in Europe, even to
that of having his house robbed, and his causing the thieves to be tried
and sentenced to transportation. In the summer-time he travelled about
the country in England and pitched his tent wherever fancy prompted. One
autumn afternoon in September he writes to me from Leamington:--
"I received your letter only this morning, at this cleanest and
prettiest of English towns, where we are going to spend a week or
two before taking our departure for Paris. We are acquainted with
Leamington already, having resided here two summers ago; and the
country round about is unadulterated England, rich in old castles,
manor-houses, churches, and thatched cottages, and as green as
Paradise itself. I only wish I had a house here, and that you could
come and be my guest in it; but I am a poor wayside vagabond, and
only find shelter for a night or so, and then trudge onward again.
My wife and children and myself are familiar with all kinds of
lodgement and modes of living, but we have forgotten what home
is,--at least the children have, poor things! I doubt whether they
will ever feel inclined to live long in one place. The worst of it
is, I have outgrown my house in Concord, and feel no inclination to
return to it.
"We spent seven weeks in Manchester, and went most diligently to the
Art Exhibition; and I really begin to be sensible of the rudiments
of a taste in pictures."
It was during one of his rambles with Alexander Ireland through the
Manchester Exhibition rooms that Hawthorne saw Tennyson wandering about.
I have always thought it unfortunate that these two men of genius could
not have been introduced on that occasion. Hawthorne was too shy to seek
an introduction, and Tennyson was not aware that the American author was
present. Hawthorne records in his journal that he gazed at Tennyson with
all his eyes, "and rejoiced more in him than in all the other wonders of
the Exhibition." When I afterwards told Tennyson that the author whose
"Twice-Told Tales" he happened to be then reading at Farringford had met
him at Manchester, but did not make himself known, the Laureate said in
his frank and hearty manner: "Why didn't he come up and let me shake
hands with him? I am sure I should have been glad to meet a man like
Hawthorne anywhere."
At the close of 1857 Hawthorne writes to me that he hears nothing of the
appointment of his successor in the consulate, since he had sent in his
resignation. "Somebody may turn up any day," he says, "with a new
commission in his pocket." He was meanwhile getting ready for Italy, and
he writes, "I expect shortly to be released from durance."
In his last letter before leaving England for the Continent he says:--
"I made up a huge package the other day, consisting of seven closely
written volumes of journal, kept by me since my arrival in England,
and filled with sketches of places and men and manners, many of
which would doubtless be very delightful to the public. I think I
shall seal them up, with directions in my will to have them opened
and published a century hence; and your firm shall have the refusal
of them then.
"Remember me to everybody, for I love all my friends at least as
well as ever."
Released from the cares of office, and having nothing to distract his
attention, his life on the Continent opened full of delightful
excitement. His pecuniary situation was such as to enable him to live
very comfortably in a country where, at that time, prices were moderate.
In a letter dated from a villa near Florence on the 3d of September,
1858, he thus describes in a charming manner his way of life in Italy:--
"I am afraid I have stayed away too long, and am forgotten by
everybody. You have piled up the dusty remnants of my editions, I
suppose, in that chamber over the shop, where you once took me to
smoke a cigar, and have crossed my name out of your list of authors,
without so much as asking whether I am dead or alive. But I like it
well enough, nevertheless. It is pleasant to feel at last that I am
really away from America,--a satisfaction that I never enjoyed as
long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to me that the
quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was continually
filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward and
homeward. I first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At
Rome, too, it was not much better. But here in Florence, and in the
summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have escaped out of all
my old tracks, and am really remote.
"I like my present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill,
overlooking Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment;
insomuch that each member of the family, including servants, has a
separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of
upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions.
"At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower, haunted by
owls and by the ghost of a monk, who was confined there in the
thirteenth century, previous to being burned at the stake in the
principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at
twenty-eight dollars a month; but I mean to take it away bodily and
clap it into a romance, which I have in my head ready to be written
out.
"Speaking of romances, I have planned two, one or both of which I
could have ready for the press in a few months if I were either in
England or America. But I find this Italian atmosphere not favorable
to the close toil of composition, although it is a very good air to
dream in. I must breathe the fogs of old England or the east-winds
of Massachusetts, in order to put me into working trim.
Nevertheless, I shall endeavor to be busy during the coming winter
at Rome, but there will be so much to distract my thoughts that I
have little hope of seriously accomplishing anything. It is a pity;
for I have really a plethora of ideas, and should feel relieved by
discharging some of them upon the public.
"We shall continue here till the end of this month, and shall then
return to Rome, where I have already taken a house for six months.
In the middle of April we intend to start for home by the way of
Geneva and Paris; and, after spending a few weeks in England, shall
embark for Boston in July or the beginning of August. After so long
an absence (more than five years already, which will be six before
you see me at the old Corner), it is not altogether delightful to
think of returning. Everybody will be changed, and I myself, no
doubt, as much as anybody. Ticknor and you, I suppose, were both
upset in the late religious earthquake, and when I inquire for you
the clerks will direct me to the 'Business Men's Conference.' It
won't do. I shall be forced to come back again and take refuge in a
London lodging. London is like the grave in one respect,--any man
can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself
homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.
"Speaking of the grave reminds me of old age and other disagreeable
matters; and I would remark that one grows old in Italy twice or
three times as fast as in other countries. I have three gray hairs
now for one that I brought from England, and I shall look venerable
indeed by next summer, when I return.
"Remember me affectionately to all my friends. Whoever has a
kindness for me may be assured that I have twice as much for him."
Hawthorne's second visit to Rome, in the winter of 1859, was not a
fortunate one. His own health was excellent during his sojourn there,
but several members of his family fell ill, and he became very nervous
and longed to get away. In one of his letters he says:--
"I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell
forever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has
happened to it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish
the very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it."
He found solace, however, during the series of domestic troubles
(continued illness in his family) that befell, in writing memoranda for
"The Marble Faun." He thus announces to me the beginning of the new
romance:--
"I take some credit to myself for having sternly shut myself up for
an hour or two almost every day, and come to close grips with a
romance which I have been trying to tear out of my mind. As for my
success, I can't say much; indeed, I don't know what to say at all.
I only know that I have produced what seems to be a larger amount of
scribble than either of my former romances, and that portions of it
interested me a good deal while I was writing them; but I have had
so many interruptions, from things to see and things to suffer, that
the story has developed itself in a very imperfect way, and will
have to be revised hereafter. I could finish it for the press in the
time that I am to remain here (till the 15th of April), but my brain
is tired of it just now; and, besides, there are many objects that I
shall regret not seeing hereafter, though I care very little about
seeing them now; so I shall throw aside the romance, and take it up
again next August at The Wayside."
He decided to be back in England early in the summer, and to sail for
home in July. He writes to me from Rome:--
"I shall go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be
very well contented there.... If I were but a hundred times richer
than I am, how very comfortable I could be! I consider it a great
piece of good fortune that I have had experience of the discomforts
and miseries of Italy, and did not go directly home from England.
Anything will seem like Paradise after a Roman winter.
"If I had but a house fit to live in, I should be greatly more
reconciled to coming home; but I am really at a loss to imagine how
we are to squeeze ourselves into that little old cottage of mine. We
had outgrown it before we came away, and most of us are twice as big
now as we were then.
"I have an attachment to the place, and should be sorry to give it
up; but I shall half ruin myself if I try to enlarge the house, and
quite if I build another. So what is to be done? Pray have some
plan for me before I get back; not that I think you can possibly hit
on anything that will suit me.... I shall return by way of Venice
and Geneva, spend two or three weeks or more in Paris, and sail for
home, as I said, in July. It would be an exceeding delight to me to
meet you or Ticknor in England, or anywhere else. At any rate, it
will cheer my heart to see you all and the old Corner itself, when I
touch my dear native soil again."
I went abroad again in 1859, and found Hawthorne back in England,
working away diligently at "The Marble Faun." While travelling on the
Continent, during the autumn I had constant letters from him, giving
accounts of his progress on the new romance. He says: "I get along more
slowly than I expected.... If I mistake not, it will have some good
chapters." Writing on the 10th of October he tells me:--
"The romance is almost finished, a great heap of manuscript being
already accumulated, and only a few concluding chapters remaining
behind. If hard pushed, I could have it ready for the press in a
fortnight; but unless the publishers [Smith and Elder were to bring
out the work in England] are in a hurry, I shall be somewhat longer
about it. I have found far more work to do upon it than I
anticipated. To confess the truth, I admire it exceedingly at
intervals, but am liable to cold fits, during which I think it the
most infernal nonsense. You ask for the title. I have not yet fixed
upon one, but here are some that have occurred to me; neither of
them exactly meets my idea: 'Monte Beni; or, The Faun. A Romance.'
'The Romance of a Faun.' 'The Faun of Monte Beni.' 'Monte Beni: a
Romance.' 'Miriam: a Romance.' 'Hilda: a Romance.' 'Donatello: a
Romance.' 'The Faun: a Romance.' 'Marble and Man: a Romance.' When
you have read the work (which I especially wish you to do before it
goes to press), you will be able to select one of them, or imagine
something better. There is an objection in my mind to an Italian
name, though perhaps Monte Beni might do. Neither do I wish, if I
can help it, to make the fantastic aspect of the book too prominent
by putting the Faun into the title-page."
Hawthorne wrote so intensely on his new story, that he was quite worn
down before he finished it. To recruit his strength he went to Redcar,
where the bracing air of the German Ocean soon counteracted the ill
effect of overwork. "The Marble Faun" was in the London printing-office
in November, and he seemed very glad to have it off his hands. His
letters to me at this time (I was still on the Continent) were jubilant
with hope. He was living in Leamington, and was constantly writing to me
that I should find the next two months more comfortable in England than
anywhere else. On the 17th he writes:--
"The Italian spring commences in February, which is certainly an
advantage, especially as from February to May is the most
disagreeable portion of the English year. But it is always summer by
a bright coal-fire. We find nothing to complain of in the climate of
Leamington. To be sure, we cannot always see our hands before us for
fog; but I like fog, and do not care about seeing my hand before me.
We have thought of staying here till after Christmas and then going
somewhere else,--perhaps to Bath, perhaps to Devonshire. But all
this is uncertain. Leamington is not so desirable a residence in
winter as in summer; its great charm consisting in the many
delightful walks and drives, and in its neighborhood to interesting
places. I have quite finished the book (some time ago) and have sent
it to Smith and Elder, who tell me it is in the printer's hands, but
I have received no proof-sheets. They wrote to request another title
instead of the 'Romance of Monte Beni,' and I sent them their choice
of a dozen. I don't know what they have chosen; neither do I
understand their objection to the above. Perhaps they don't like the
book at all; but I shall not trouble myself about that, as long as
they publish it and pay me my £600. For my part, I think it much my
best romance; but I can see some points where it is open to assault.
If it could have appeared first in America, it would have been a
safe thing....
"I mean to spend the rest of my abode in England in blessed
idleness: and as for my journal, in the first place I have not got
it here; secondly, there is nothing in it that will do to publish."
* * * * *
Hawthorne was, indeed, a consummate artist, and I do not remember a
single slovenly passage in all his acknowledged writings. It was a
privilege, and one that I can never sufficiently estimate, to have
known him personally through so many years. He was unlike any other
author I have met, and there were qualities in his nature so sweet and
commendable, that, through all his shy reserve, they sometimes asserted
themselves in a marked and conspicuous manner. I have known rude people,
who were jostling him in a crowd, give way at the sound of his low and
almost irresolute voice, so potent was the gentle spell of command that
seemed born of his genius.
Although he was apt to keep aloof from his kind, and did not hesitate
frequently to announce by his manner that
"Solitude to him
Was blithe society, who filled the air
With gladness and involuntary songs,"
I ever found him, like Milton's Raphael, an "affable" angel, and
inclined to converse on whatever was human and good in life.
Here are some more extracts from the letters he wrote to me while he was
engaged on "The Marble Faun." On the 11th of February, 1860, he writes
from Leamington in England (I was then in Italy):--
"I received your letter from Florence, and conclude that you are now
in Rome, and probably enjoying the Carnival,--a tame description of
which, by the by, I have introduced into my Romance.
"I thank you most heartily for your kind wishes in favor of the
forthcoming work, and sincerely join my own prayers to yours in its
behalf, but without much confidence of a good result. My own opinion
is, that I am not really a popular writer, and that what popularity
I have gained is chiefly accidental, and owing to other causes than
my own kind or degree of merit. Possibly I may (or may not) deserve
something better than popularity; but looking at all my productions,
and especially this latter one, with a cold or critical eye, I can
see that they do not make their appeal to the popular mind. It is
odd enough, moreover, that my own individual taste is for quite
another class of works than those which I myself am able to write.
If I were to meet with such books as mine, by another writer, I
don't believe I should be able to get through them.
* * * * *
"To return to my own moonshiny Romance; its fate will soon
be settled, for Smith and Elder mean to publish on the 28th of this
month. Poor Ticknor will have a tight scratch to get his edition
out contemporaneously; they having sent him the third volume
only a week ago. I think, however, there will be no danger of
piracy in America. Perhaps nobody will think it worth stealing.
Give my best regards to William Story, and look well at his Cleopatra,
for you will meet her again in one of the chapters which I wrote
with most pleasure. If he does not find himself famous henceforth,
the fault will be none of mine. I, at least, have done my duty by
him, whatever delinquency there may be on the part of other critics.
"Smith and Elder persist in calling the book 'Transformation,' which
gives one the idea of Harlequin in a pantomime; but I have strictly
enjoined upon Ticknor to call it 'The Marble Faun; a Romance of Monte
Beni.'"
In one of his letters written at this period, referring to his design of
going home, he says:--
"I shall not have been absent seven years till the 5th of July next,
and I scorn to touch Yankee soil sooner than that.... As regards
going home I alternate between a longing and a dread."
Returning to London from the Continent, in April, I found this letter,
written from Bath, awaiting my arrival:--
"You are welcome back. I really began to fear that you had been
assassinated among the Apennines or killed in that outbreak at Rome.
I have taken passages for all of us in the steamer which sails the
16th of June. Your berths are Nos. 19 and 20. I engaged them with
the understanding that you might go earlier or later, if you chose;
but I would advise you to go on the 16th; in the first place,
because the state-rooms for our party are the most eligible in the
ship; secondly, because we shall otherwise mutually lose the
pleasure of each other's company. Besides, I consider it my duty,
towards Ticknor and towards Boston, and America at large, to take
you into custody and bring you home; for I know you will never come
except upon compulsion. Let me know at once whether I am to use
force.
"The book (The Marble Faun) has done better than I thought it
would; for you will have discovered, by this time, that it is an
audacious attempt to impose a tissue of absurdities upon the public
by the mere art of style of narrative. I hardly hoped that it would
go down with John Bull; but then it is always my best point of
writing, to undertake such a task, and I really put what strength I
have into many parts of this book.
"The English critics generally (with two or three unimportant
exceptions) have been sufficiently favorable, and the review in the
Times awarded the highest praise of all. At home, too, the notices
have been very kind, so far as they have come under my eye. Lowell
had a good one in the Atlantic Monthly, and Hillard an excellent one
in the Courier; and yesterday I received a sheet of the May number
of the Atlantic containing a really keen and profound article by
Whipple, in which he goes over all my works, and recognizes that
element of unpopularity which (as nobody knows better than myself)
pervades them all. I agree with almost all he says, except that I am
conscious of not deserving nearly so much praise. When I get home, I
will try to write a more genial book; but the Devil himself always
seems to get into my inkstand, and I can only exorcise him by
pensful at a time.
"I am coming to London very soon, and mean to spend a fortnight of
next month there. I have been quite homesick through this past
dreary winter. Did you ever spend a winter in England? If not,
reserve your ultimate conclusion about the country until you have
done so."
We met in London early in May, and, as our lodgings were not far apart,
we were frequently together. I recall many pleasant dinners with him and
mutual friends in various charming seaside and country-side places. We
used to take a run down to Greenwich or Blackwall once or twice a week,
and a trip to Richmond was always grateful to him. Bennoch was
constantly planning a day's happiness for his friend, and the hours at
that pleasant season of the year were not long enough for our delights.
In London we strolled along the Strand, day after day, now diving into
Bolt Court, in pursuit of Johnson's whereabouts, and now stumbling
around the Temple, where Goldsmith at one time had his quarters.
Hawthorne was never weary of standing on London Bridge, and watching
the steamers plying up and down the Thames. I was much amused by his
manner towards importunate and sometimes impudent beggars, scores of
whom would attack us even in the shortest walk. He had a mild way of
making a severe and cutting remark, which used to remind me of a little
incident which Charlotte Cushman once related to me. She said a man in
the gallery of a theatre (I think she was on the stage at the time) made
such a disturbance that the play could not 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, exclaiming, "No! I pray you don't throw him over! I beg of
you, dear friends, don't throw him over, but--_kill him where he is_."
One of our most royal times was at a parting dinner at the house of
Barry Cornwall. Among the notables present were Kinglake and Leigh Hunt.
Our kind-hearted host and his admirable wife greatly delighted in
Hawthorne, and they made this occasion a most grateful one to him. I
remember when we went up to the drawing-room to join the ladies after
dinner, the two dear old poets, Leigh Hunt and Barry Cornwall, mounted
the stairs with their arms round each other in a very tender and loving
way. Hawthorne often referred to this scene as one he would not have
missed for a great deal.
His renewed intercourse with Motley in England gave him peculiar
pleasure, and his genius found an ardent admirer in the eminent
historian. He did not go much, into society at that time, but there were
a few houses in London where he always seemed happy.
I met him one night at a great evening-party, looking on from a nook a
little removed from the full glare of the _soirée_. Soon, however, it
was whispered about that the famous American romance-writer was in the
room, and an enthusiastic English lady, a genuine admirer and
intelligent reader of his books, ran for her album and attacked him for
"a few words and his name at the end." He looked dismally perplexed, and
turning to me said imploringly in a whisper, "For pity's sake, what
shall I write? I can't think of a word to add to my name. Help me to
something." Thinking him partly in fun, I said, "Write an original
couplet,--this one, for instance,--
'When this you see,
Remember me,'"
and to my amazement he stepped forward at once to the table, wrote the
foolish lines I had suggested, and, shutting the book, handed it very
contentedly to the happy lady.
We sailed from England together in the month of June, as we had
previously arranged, and our voyage home was, to say the least, an
unusual one. We had calm summer, moonlight weather, with no storms. Mrs.
Stowe was on board, and in her own cheery and delightful way she
enlivened the passage with some capital stories of her early life.
When we arrived at Queenstown, the captain announced to us that, as the
ship would wait there six hours, we might go ashore and see something of
our Irish friends. So we chartered several jaunting-cars, after much
tribulation and delay in arranging terms with the drivers thereof, and
started off on a merry exploring expedition. I remember there was a good
deal of racing up and down the hills of Queenstown, much shouting and
laughing, and crowds of beggars howling after us for pence and beer. The
Irish jaunting-car is a peculiar institution, and we all sat with our
legs dangling over the road in a "dim and perilous way." Occasionally a
horse would give out, for the animals were sad specimens, poorly fed
and wofully driven. We were almost devoured by the ragamuffins that ran
beside our wheels, and I remember the "sad civility" with which
Hawthorne regarded their clamors. We had provided ourselves before
starting with much small coin, which, however, gave out during our first
mile. Hawthorne attempted to explain our inability further to supply
their demands, having, as he said to them, nothing less than a sovereign
in his pocket, when a voice from the crowd shouted, "Bedad, your honor,
I can change that for ye"; and the knave actually did it on the spot.
Hawthorne's love for the sea amounted to a passionate worship; and while
I (the worst sailor probably on this planet) was longing, spite of the
good company on board, to reach land as soon as possible, Hawthorne was
constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way, "I should like to sail on
and on forever, and never touch the shore again." He liked to stand
alone in the bows of the ship and see the sun go down, and he was never
tired of walking the deck at midnight. I used to watch his dark,
solitary figure under the stars, pacing up and down some unfrequented
part of the vessel, musing and half melancholy. Sometimes he would lie
down beside me and commiserate my unquiet condition. Seasickness, he
declared, he could not understand, and was constantly recommending most
extraordinary dishes and drinks, "all made out of the _artist's_ brain,"
which he said were sovereign remedies for nautical illness. I remember
to this day some of the preparations which, in his revelry of fancy, he
would advise me to take, a farrago of good things almost rivalling
"Oberon's Feast," spread out so daintily in Herrick's "Hesperides." He
thought, at first, if I could bear a few roc's eggs beaten up by a
mermaid on a dolphin's back, I might be benefited. He decided that a
gruel made from a sheaf of Robin Hood's arrows would be strengthening.
When suffering pain, "a right gude willie-waught," or a stiff cup of
hemlock of the Socrates brand, before retiring, he considered very good.
He said he had heard recommended a dose of salts distilled from the
tears of Niobe, but he didn't approve of that remedy. He observed that
he had a high opinion of hearty food, such as potted owl with Minerva
sauce, airy tongues of sirens, stewed ibis, livers of Roman Capitol
geese, the wings of a Phoenix not too much done, love-lorn nightingales
cooked briskly over Aladdin's lamp, chicken-pies made of fowls raised by
Mrs. Carey, Nautilus chowder, and the like. Fruit, by all means, should
always be taken by an uneasy victim at sea, especially Atalanta pippins
and purple grapes raised by Bacchus & Co. Examining my garments one day
as I lay on deck, he thought I was not warmly enough clad, and he
recommended, before I took another voyage, that I should fit myself out
in Liverpool with a good warm shirt from the shop of Nessus & Co. in
Bold Street, where I could also find stout seven-league boots to keep
out the damp. He knew another shop, he said, where I could buy
raven-down stockings, and sable clouds with a silver lining, most warm
and comfortable for a sea voyage.
His own appetite was excellent, and day after day he used to come on
deck after dinner and describe to me what he had eaten. Of course his
accounts were always exaggerations, for my amusement. I remember one
night he gave me a running catalogue of what food he had partaken during
the day, and the sum total was convulsing from its absurdity. Among the
viands he had consumed, I remember he stated there were "several yards
of steak," and a "whole warrenful of Welsh rabbits." The "divine spirit
of Humor" was upon him during many of those days at sea, and he revelled
in it like a careless child.
That was a voyage, indeed, long to be remembered, and I shall ever look
back upon it as the most satisfactory "sea turn" I ever happened to
experience. I have sailed many a weary, watery mile since then, but
_Hawthorne_ was not on board!
The summer after his arrival home he spent quietly in Concord, at the
Wayside, and illness in his family made him at times unusually sad. In
one of his notes to me he says:--
"I am continually reminded nowadays of a response which I once heard
a drunken sailor make to a pious gentleman, who asked him how he
felt, 'Pretty d--d miserable, thank God!' It very well expresses my
thorough discomfort and forced acquiescence."
Occasionally he wrote requesting me to make a change, here and there, in
the new edition of his works then passing through the press. On the 23d
of September, 1860, he writes:--
"Please to append the following note to the foot of the page, at the
commencement of the story called 'Dr. Heidegger's Experiment,' in
the 'Twice-Told Tales': 'In an English Review, not long since, I
have been accused of plagiarizing the idea of this story from a
chapter in one of the novels of Alexandra Dumas. There has
undoubtedly been a plagiarism, on one side or the other; but as my
story was written a good deal more than twenty years ago, and as the
novel is of considerably more recent date, I take pleasure in
thinking that M. Dumas has done me the honor to appropriate one of
the fanciful conceptions of my earlier days. He is heartily welcome
to it; nor is it the only instance, by many, in which the great
French romancer has exercised the privilege of commanding genius by
confiscating the intellectual property of less famous people to his
own use and behoof.'"
Hawthorne was a diligent reader of the Bible, and when sometimes, in my
ignorant way, I would question, in a proof-sheet, his use of a word, he
would almost always refer me to the Bible as his authority. It was a
great pleasure to hear him talk about the Book of Job, and his voice
would be tremulous with feeling, as he sometimes quoted a touching
passage from the New Testament. In one of his letters he says to me:--
"Did not I suggest to you, last summer, the publication of the Bible
in ten or twelve 12mo volumes? I think it would have great success,
and, at least (but, as a publisher, I suppose this is the very
smallest of your cares), it would result in the salvation of a great
many souls, who will never find their way to heaven, if left to
learn it from the inconvenient editions of the Scriptures now in
use. It is very singular that this form of publishing the Bible in a
single bulky or closely printed volume should be so long continued.
It was first adopted, I suppose, as being the universal mode of
publication at the time when the Bible was translated. Shakespeare,
and the other old dramatists and poets, were first published in the
same form; but all of them have long since been broken into dozens
and scores of portable and readable volumes; and why not the Bible?"
During this period, after his return from Europe, I saw him frequently
at the Wayside, in Concord. He now seemed happy in the dwelling he had
put in order for the calm and comfort of his middle and later life. He
had added a tower to his house, in which he could be safe from
intrusion, and where he could muse and write. Never was poet or romancer
more fitly shrined. Drummond at Hawthornden, Scott at Abbotsford,
Dickens at Gad's Hill, Irving at Sunnyside, were not more appropriately
sheltered. Shut up in his tower, he could escape from the tumult of
life, and be alone with only the birds and the bees in concert outside
his casement. The view from this apartment, on every side, was lovely,
and Hawthorne enjoyed the charming prospect as I have known, few men to
enjoy nature.
His favorite walk lay near his house,--indeed it was part of his own
grounds,--a little hillside, where he had worn a foot-path, and where he
might be found in good weather, when not employed in the tower. While
walking to and fro on this bit of rising ground he meditated and
composed innumerable romances that were never written, as well as some
that were. Here he, first announced to me his plan of "The Dolliver
Romance," and, from what he told me of his design of the story as it
existed in his mind, I thought it would have been the greatest of his
books. An enchanting memory is left of that morning when he laid out the
whole story before me as he intended to write it. The plot was a grand
one, and I tried to tell him how much I was impressed by it. Very soon
after our interview, he wrote to me:--
"In compliance with your exhortations, I have begun to think
seriously of that story, not, as yet, with a pen in my hand, but
trudging to and fro on my hilltop.... I don't mean to let you see
the first chapters till I have written the final sentence of the
story. Indeed, the first chapters of a story ought always to be the
last written.... If you want me to write a good book, send me a good
pen; not a gold one, for they seldom suit me; but a pen flexible and
capacious of ink, and that will not grow stiff and rheumatic the
moment I get attached to it. I never met with a good pen in my
life."
Time went on, the war broke out, and he had not the heart to go on with
his new Romance. During the month of April, 1862, he made a visit to
Washington with his friend Ticknor, to whom he was greatly attached.
While on this visit to the capital he sat to Leutze for a portrait. He
took a special fancy to the artist, and, while he was sitting to him,
wrote a long letter to me. Here is an extract from it:--
"I stay here only while Leutze finishes a portrait, which I think
will be the best ever painted of the same unworthy subject. One
charm it must needs have,--an aspect of immortal jollity and
well-to-doness; for Leutze, when the sitting begins, gives me a
first-rate cigar, and when he sees me getting tired, he brings out a
bottle of splendid champagne; and we quaffed and smoked yesterday,
in a blessed state of mutual good-will, for three hours and a half,
during which the picture made a really miraculous progress. Leutze
is the best of fellows."
In the same letter he thus describes the sinking of the Cumberland, and
I know of nothing finer in its way:--
"I see in a newspaper that Holmes is going to write a song on the
sinking of the Cumberland; and feeling it to be a subject of
national importance, it occurs to me that he might like to know her
present condition. She lies with her three masts sticking up out of
the water, and careened over, the water being nearly on a level with
her maintop,--I mean that first landing-place from the deck of the
vessel, after climbing the shrouds. The rigging does not appear at
all damaged. There is a tattered bit of a pennant, about a foot and
a half long, fluttering from the tip-top of one of the masts; but
the flag, the ensign of the ship (which never was struck, thank
God), is under water, so as to be quite invisible, being attached to
the gaff, I think they call it, of the mizzen-mast; and though this
bald description makes nothing of it, I never saw anything so
gloriously forlorn as those three masts. I did not think it was in
me to be so moved by any spectacle of the kind. Bodies still
occasionally float up from it. The Secretary of the Navy says she
shall lie there till she goes to pieces, but I suppose by and by
they will sell her to some Yankee for the value of her old iron.
"P.S. My hair really is not so white as this photograph, which I
enclose, makes me. The sun seems to take an infernal pleasure in
making me venerable,--as if I were as old as himself."
Hawthorne has rested so long in the twilight of impersonality, that I
hesitate sometimes to reveal the man even to his warmest admirers. This
very day Sainte-Beuve has made me feel a fresh reluctance in unveiling
my friend, and there seems almost a reproof in these words, from the
eloquent French author:--
"We know nothing or nearly nothing of the life of La Bruyère, and
this obscurity adds, it has been remarked, to the effect of his
work, and, it may be said, to the piquant happiness of his destiny.
If there was not a single line of his unique book, which from the
first instant of its publication did not appear and remain in the
clear light, so, on the other hand, there was not one individual
detail regarding the author which was well known. Every ray of the
century fell upon each page of the book and the face of the man who
held it open in his hand was veiled from our sight."
Beautifully said, as usual with Sainte-Beuve, but I venture,
notwithstanding such eloquent warning, to proceed.
After his return home from Washington Hawthorne sent to me, during the
month of May, an article for the Atlantic Monthly, which he entitled
"Chiefly about War-Matters." The paper, excellently well done
throughout, of course, contained a personal description of President
Lincoln, which I thought, considered as a portrait of a living man, and
drawn by Hawthorne, it would not be wise or tasteful to print. The
office of an editor is a disagreeable one sometimes, and the case of
Hawthorne on Lincoln disturbed me not a little. After reading the
manuscript, I wrote to the author, and asked his permission to omit his
description of the President's personal appearance. As usual,--for he
was the kindest and sweetest of contributors, the most good-natured and
the most amenable man to advise I ever knew,--he consented to my
proposal, and allowed me to print the article with the alterations. If
any one will turn to the paper in the Atlantic Monthly (it is in the
number for July, 1862), it will be observed there are several notes; all
of these were written by Hawthorne himself. He complied with my request
without a murmur, but he always thought I was wrong in my decision. He
said the whole description of the interview and the President's personal
appearance were, to his mind, the only parts of the article worth
publishing. "What a terrible thing," he complained, "it is to try to let
off a little bit of truth into this miserable humbug of a world!"
President Lincoln is dead, and as Hawthorne once wrote to me, "Upon my
honor, it seems to me the passage omitted has an historical value," I
will copy here verbatim what I advised my friend, both on his own
account and the President's, not to print nine years ago. Hawthorne and
his party had gone into the President's room, annexed, as he says, as
supernumeraries to a deputation from a Massachusetts whip-factory, with
a present of a splendid whip to the Chief Magistrate:--
"By and by there was a little stir on the staircase and in the
passage way, and in lounged a tall, loose-jointed figure, of an
exaggerated Yankee port and demeanor, whom (as being about the
homeliest man I ever saw, yet by no means repulsive or disagreeable)
it was impossible not to recognize as Uncle Abe.
"Unquestionably, Western man though he be, and Kentuckian by birth,
President Lincoln is the essential representative of all Yankees,
and the veritable specimen, physically, of what the world seems
determined to regard as our characteristic qualities. It is the
strangest and yet the fittest thing in the jumble of human
vicissitudes, that he, out of so many millions, unlooked for,
unselected by any intelligible process that could be based upon his
genuine qualities, unknown to those who chose him, and unsuspected
of what endowments may adapt him for his tremendous responsibility,
should have found the way open for him to fling his lank personality
into the chair of state,--where, I presume, it was his first impulse
to throw his legs on the council-table, and tell the Cabinet
Ministers a story. There is no describing his lengthy awkwardness,
nor the uncouthness of his movement; and yet it seemed as if I had
been in the habit of seeing him daily, and had shaken hands with him
a thousand times in some village street; so true was he to the
aspect of the pattern American, though with a certain extravagance
which, possibly, I exaggerated still further by the delighted
eagerness with which I took it in. If put to guess his calling and
livelihood, I should have taken him for a country schoolmaster as
soon as anything else. He was dressed in a rusty black frock-coat
and pantaloons, unbrushed, and worn so faithfully that the suit had
adapted itself to the curves and angularities of his figure, and had
grown to be an outer skin of the man. He had shabby slippers on his
feet. His hair was black, still unmixed with gray, stiff, somewhat
bushy, and had apparently been acquainted with neither brush nor
comb that morning, after the disarrangement of the pillow; and as to
a nightcap, Uncle Abe probably knows nothing of such effeminacies.
His complexion is dark and sallow, betokening, I fear, an
insalubrious atmosphere around the White House; he has thick black
eyebrows and an impending brow; his nose is large, and the lines
about his mouth are very strongly defined.
"The whole physiognomy is as coarse a one as you would meet anywhere
in the length and breadth of the States; but, withal, it is
redeemed, illuminated, softened, and brightened by a kindly though
serious look out of his eyes, and an expression of homely sagacity,
that seems weighted with rich results of village experience. A great
deal of native sense; no bookish cultivation, no refinement; honest
at heart, and thoroughly so, and yet, in some sort, sly,--at least,
endowed with a sort of tact and wisdom that are akin to craft, and
would impel him, I think, to take an antagonist in flank, rather
than to make a bull-run at him right in front. But, on the whole, I
liked this sallow, queer, sagacious visage, with the homely human
sympathies that warmed it; and, for my small share in the matter,
would as lief have Uncle Abe for a ruler as any man whom it would
have been practicable to put in his place.
"Immediately on his entrance the President accosted our member of
Congress, who had us in charge, and, with a comical twist of his
face, made some jocular remark about the length of his breakfast. He
then greeted us all round, not waiting for an introduction, but
shaking and squeezing everybody's hand with the utmost cordiality,
whether the individual's name was announced to him or not. His
manner towards us was wholly without pretence, but yet had a kind of
natural dignity, quite sufficient to keep the forwardest of us from
clapping him on the shoulder and asking for a story. A mutual
acquaintance being established, our leader took the whip out of its
case, and began to read the address of presentation. The whip was an
exceedingly long one, its handle wrought in ivory (by some artist in
the Massachusetts State Prison, I believe), and ornamented with a
medallion of the President, and other equally beautiful devices; and
along its whole length there was a succession of golden bands and
ferrules. The address was shorter than the whip, but equally well
made, consisting chiefly of an explanatory description of these
artistic designs, and closing with a hint that the gift was a
suggestive and emblematic one, and that the President would
recognize the use to which such an instrument should be put.
"This suggestion gave Uncle Abe rather a delicate task in his reply,
because, slight as the matter seemed, it apparently called for some
declaration, or intimation, or faint foreshadowing of policy in
reference to the conduct of the war, and the final treatment of the
Rebels. But the President's Yankee aptness and not-to-be-caughtness
stood him in good stead, and he jerked or wiggled himself out of
the dilemma with an uncouth dexterity that was entirely in
character; although, without his gesticulation of eye and
mouth,--and especially the flourish of the whip, with which he
imagined himself touching up a pair of fat horses,--I doubt whether
his words would be worth recording, even if I could remember them.
The gist of the reply was, that he accepted the whip as an emblem of
peace, not punishment; and, this great affair over, we retired out
of the presence in high good-humor, only regretting that we could
not have seen the President sit down and fold up his legs (which is
said to be a most extraordinary spectacle), or have heard him tell
one of those delectable stories for which he is so celebrated. A
good many of them are afloat upon the common talk of Washington, and
are certainly the aptest, pithiest, and funniest little things
imaginable; though, to be sure, they smack of the frontier freedom,
and would not always bear repetition in a drawing-room, or on the
immaculate page of the Atlantic."
So runs the passage which caused some good-natured discussion nine years
ago, between the contributor and the editor. Perhaps I was squeamish not
to have been, willing to print this matter at that time. Some persons,
no doubt, will adopt that opinion, but as both President and author have
long ago met on the other side of criticism and magazines, we will leave
the subject to their decision, they being most interested in the
transaction. I did what seemed best in 1862. In 1871 "circumstances have
changed" with both parties, and I venture to-day what I hardly dared
then.
* * * * *
Whenever I look at Hawthorne's portrait, and that is pretty often, some
new trait or anecdote or reminiscence comes up and clamors to be made
known to those who feel an interest in it. But time and eternity call
loudly for mortal gossip to be brief, and I must hasten to my last
session over that child of genius, who first saw the light on the 4th of
July, 1804.
One of his favorite books was Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, and
in 1862 I dedicated to him the Household Edition of that work. When he
received the first volume, he wrote to me a letter of which I am so
proud that I keep it among my best treasures.
"I am exceedingly gratified by the dedication. I do not deserve so
high an honor; but if you think me worthy, it is enough to make the
compliment in the highest degree acceptable, no matter who may
dispute my title to it. I care more for your good opinion than for
that of a host of critics, and have an excellent reason for so
doing; inasmuch as my literary success, whatever it has been or may
be, is the result of my connection with you. Somehow or other you
smote the rock of public sympathy on my behalf, and a stream gushed
forth in sufficient quantity to quench my thirst though not to drown
me. I think no author can ever have had publisher that he valued so
much as I do mine."
He began in 1862 to send me some articles from his English Journal for
the Atlantic magazine, which he afterwards collected into a volume and
called "Our Old Home." On forwarding one for December of that year he
says:--
"I hope you will like it, for the subject seemed interesting to me
when I was on the spot, but I always feel a singular despondency and
heaviness of heart in reopening those old journals now. However, if
I can make readable sketches out of them, it is no matter."
In the same letter he tells me he has been re-reading Scott's Life, and
he suggests some additions to the concluding volume. He says:--
"If the last volume is not already printed and stereotyped, I think
you ought to insert in it an explanation of all that is left
mysterious in the former volumes,--the name and family of the lady
he was in love with, etc. It is desirable, too, to know what have
been the fortunes and final catastrophes of his family and intimate
friends since his death, down to as recent a period as the death of
Lockhart. All such matter would make your edition more valuable; and
I see no reason why you should be bound by the deference to living
connections of the family that may prevent the English publishers
from inserting these particulars. We stand in the light of
posterity to them, and have the privileges of posterity.... I
should be glad to know something of the personal character and life
of his eldest son, and whether (as I have heard) he was ashamed of
his father for being a literary man. In short, fifty pages devoted
to such elucidation would make the edition unique. Do come and see
us before the leaves fall."
While he was engaged in copying out and rewriting his papers on England
for the magazine he was despondent about their reception by the public.
Speaking of them, one day, to me, he said: "We must remember that there
is a good deal of intellectual ice mingled with this wine of memory." He
was sometimes so dispirited during the war that he was obliged to
postpone his contributions for sheer lack of spirit to go on. Near the
close of the year 1862 he writes:--
"I am delighted at what you tell me about the kind appreciation of
my articles, for I feel rather gloomy about them myself. I am really
much encouraged by what you say; not but what I am sensible that you
mollify me with a good deal of soft soap, but it is skilfully
applied and effects all you intend it should.... I cannot come to
Boston to spend more than a day, just at present. It would suit me
better to come for a visit when the spring of next year is a little
advanced, and if you renew your hospitable proposition then, I shall
probably be glad to accept it; though I have now been a hermit so
long, that the thought affects me somewhat as it would to invite a
lobster or a crab to step out of his shell."
He continued, during the early months of 1863, to send now and then an
article for the magazine from his English Note-Books. On the 22d of
February he writes:--
"Here is another article. I wish it would not be so wretchedly long,
but there are many things which I shall find no opportunity to say
unless I say them now; so the article grows under my hand, and one
part of it seems just about as well worth printing as another.
Heaven sees fit to visit me with an unshakable conviction that all
this series of articles is good for nothing; but that is none of my
business, provided the public and you are of a different opinion. If
you think any part of it can be left out with advantage, you are
quite at liberty to do so. Probably I have not put Leigh Hunt quite
high enough for your sentiments respecting him; but no more genuine
characterization and criticism (so far as the writer's purpose to be
true goes) was ever done. It is very slight. I might have made more
of it, but should not have improved it.
"I mean to write two more of these articles, and then hold my hand.
I intend to come to Boston before the end of this week, if the
weather is good. It must be nearly or quite six months since I was
there! I wonder how many people there are in the world who would
keep their nerves in tolerably good order through such a length of
nearly solitary imprisonment?"
I advised him to begin to put the series in order for a volume, and to
preface the book with his "Consular Experiences." On the 18th of April
he writes:--
"I don't think the public will bear any more of this sort of
thing.... I had a letter from ----, the other day, in which he sends
me the enclosed verses, and I think he would like to have them
published in the Atlantic. Do it if you like, I pretend to no
judgment in poetry. He also sent this epithalamium by Mrs. ----, and
I doubt not the good lady will be pleased to see it copied into one
of our American newspapers with a few laudatory remarks. Can't you
do it in the Transcript, and send her a copy? You cannot imagine how
a little praise jollifies us poor authors to the marrow of our
bones. Consider, if you had not been a publisher, you would
certainly have been one of our wretched tribe, and therefore ought
to have a fellow-feeling for us. Let Michael Angelo write the
remarks, if you have not the time."
("Michael Angelo" was a clever little Irish-boy who had the care of my
room. Hawthorne conceived a fancy for the lad, and liked to hear stories
of his smart replies to persistent authors who called during my absence
with unpromising-looking manuscripts.) On the 30th of April he writes:--
"I send the article with which the volume is to commence, and you
can begin printing it whenever you like. I can think of no better
title than this, 'Our Old Home; a Series of English Sketches, by,'
etc. I submit to your judgment whether it would not be well to print
these 'Consular Experiences' in the volume without depriving them
of any freshness they may have by previous publication in the
magazine?
"The article has some of the features that attract the curiosity of
the foolish public, being made up of personal narrative and gossip,
with a few pungencies of personal satire, which will not be the less
effective because the reader can scarcely find out who was the
individual meant. I am not without hope of drawing down upon myself
a good deal of critical severity on this score, and would gladly
i
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