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Hawthorne and His Circle

by Julian Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #6982 · 594,235 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Hawthorne and His Circle

Author: Julian Hawthorne


        
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6982]
                Most recently updated: April 2, 2009

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer, and David Widger


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Produced by An Anonymous Volunteer








HAWTHORNE AND HIS CIRCLE

By Julian Hawthorne


ILLUSTRATED


[IMAGE: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)]




CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My
father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A
revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and shadows
of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's life and
mine

I

Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My
mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of
imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile
indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on
Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted
mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr.
Pickwick--My father in 1850--The flowered writing-gown, and the
ink butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second
floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my
aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of the
age

II

Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea might have
done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--The Unpardonable Sin
and the Death--less Man--The little red house--Materials of culture--Our
best playmates--The mystery of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual
hen-fishing for poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the
ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--Nuts--Giants
and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes, ambrosial breath-My
first horseback ride--Herman Melville's stories--Another kind
of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning ladies and
melancholy-sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I abominate the sight of
it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The truth of fiction--An eighteen-months'
work--We leave five cats behind

III

Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's fingers--Our
cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle Horace--His vacuum--A
reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's first tears--The heralding
of Kossuth--The decorated engine--The chief incident of the
reception--Blithedale and Brook Farm--Notes from real
life--Rough draughts--Paths of composition--The struggle with the
Pensioner--Hawthorne's method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden
walls and a roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of
"The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President--"The most homeless people
in the world"

IV

A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His incorrigible
modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common men feel more like Emerson
than he did--His personal appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance
like the reveille of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are
in the woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus
individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--Sounds of
distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape-culture--The great white
fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A country youth of genius--Whipple's
Attic salt--An unwritten romance--The consulship retires
literature--Louisa's tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good
men--Nearer than in the world--The return of the pilgrim

V

A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the carpenter--W.
D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An aristocratic acrobat--Speech that
beggars eulogy--The boots of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The
last infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the
spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The coquetry
of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The thirsty island--Gloomy
English comforts--Systematic geniality--A standing puzzle--The
respirator--Scamps, fools, mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of
sailor-men--"Is this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm
of insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle against
dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-, Irish-, and Scotchman--An
Englishman owns his country--A contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable
gateway--Years of memorable trifles

VI

Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--Varieties of
equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming peril--Being dragged
to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and hopelessness of
destitution--Villages rooted in the landscape--Evanescence of the
spiritual and survival of the material--"Of Bebbington the holy
peak"--The Old Yew of Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and
afternoon tea--An East--Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in
the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to Longfellow--Real
breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-pugilist--Clean-cut, cold,
gentle, dry--A respectable female atheist--The tragedy of the red
ants--Voluptuous struggles--A psalm of praise

VII

Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--The average
man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--Shielded by rose-leaves
of culture and refinement--The English middle class--Prejudice,
complacency, and Burke's Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or
Browning--Satisfaction in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp,
winding, verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of
individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff--dwelling--"The Campbells
are Coming!"--Sortes Virgilianae--A division in the family--Precaution
against famine--English praying and card-playing--Exercise for mind and
body--Knight-errantry--Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and
the cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr. Squarey and
Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of jolly

VIII

Cataclysmic adventures--On the trail of dazzling fortunes--"Lovely,
but reprehensible Madham"--The throne saves the artist--English robin
redbreast--A sad and weary old man--"Most indelicate woman I've ever
known"--Perfectly chaste--Something human stirred dimly--"She loves me;
she loves me!"--The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown--Portentous
and thundering title--Honest English simplicity--"The spirit
lacking"--Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin--A famous and charming woman
of genius--Deep and wide well of human sympathy--The whooping-cough

IX

Two New England consciences--Inexhaustible faith and energy--Deep and
abiding love of England--"'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore"--"He took
an' he let go"--Naked mountains--The unsentimental little quadruped--The
human element in things sticks--The coasts of England--A string of
sleepy donkeys--Unutterable boy-thoughts--Grins and chuckles like
an ogress---Hideous maternal parody---The adorable inverted
bell-glass--Strange things happen in the world--An ominous clouding of
the water--Something the world has never known--Overweening security--An
admonition not to climb too high--How vice may become virtue by
repetition--Corporal Blair's chest--Black-Bottle Cardigan--Called to
Lisbon


X

If there were boarding-houses in paradise--Blodgett, the delight of
mankind--Solomon foresaw her--A withering retort--A modest, puny
poise about her--Hidden thoughts derived from Mother Eve and Grecian
Helen--The feminine council that ruled the Yankee captains--Bonds
of fraternity, double-riveted and copper-fastened--Through the
looking-glass--Men only of the manliest sort--The lady-paramount--Hands
which were true works of art--Retained his dignity without putting it
on--Sighed heavily over my efforts--Unctuous M. Huguenin--"From dawn to
eve I fell"--The multum-in-parvo machine--"Beauty and the Beast"--Frank
Channing--"Blood-and water!"--A lapful of Irish stew

XI

Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you marry that
woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--"The worst book anybody
ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I ever saw"--A great deal of
the feminine in Reade--Fire, pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A
philosophical library in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily
and voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the _os-rotundas_
sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of it true;
but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived--Appropriated somebody
else's adventure--Filtering remarks through the mind of a third
person--A delightful Irishman--Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate
opinion--The whole line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody
would invent a new sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well
dressed--Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the
elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine will always
rest on it

XII

Talked familiarly with kings and queens--Half-witted girl who giggled
all the time--It gnawed me terribly--A Scotch terrier named Towsey--A
sentiment of diplomatic etiquette--London as a physical entity--Ladies
in low-necked dresses--An elderly man like a garden-spider--Into the
bowels of the earth--The inner luminousness of genius--Isolated and
tragic situation--"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"--The great, wild,
mysterious Borrow--Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful--"Ma'am,
you expose yourself!"--Plane, spokeshave, gouge, and
chisel--"I-passed-the-Lightning"--Parallel-O-grams--A graduate of
Antioch--"Continual cursing"--A catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable
sisterhood"--"In truth I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide-awake
of these things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at
Folkestone for France

XIII

Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but perilous woman
with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal ice-palace--Confused
mountain of family luggage--Poplars for lances--Miraculous crimson
comforters--Rivers of human gore--Curling mustachios and nothing
to do--Odd behavior of grown people--Venus, the populace, and the
MacDaniels--The happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her
constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations--Sitting
up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An old passion
reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea-anemones--If you were
in the Garden of Eden--An umbrella full of napoleons--Was Byron an
Esquimau?


XIV

Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George Combe turned
out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright Titian hair--"All that's left
of him"--The pyramidal man of destiny--The thoughts of a boy are long,
long thoughts--Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the microscope--A
stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My
father's jeremiades--"Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as
whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"--"The brazen
trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases of feeling--Springs of
creative imagination roused--The Roman fever--A sad book--Effects of the
death-blow--The rest is silence

XV

The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor, battered,
wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and scourge--Dulce est desipere
in loco--A rollicking world of happy fools--Endless sunshine of some
sort--Greenwich Fair was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past,
never drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and
strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of dressing
themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat wife--Apparent license
under courteous restraint--He laughed and pelted and was pelted--William
Story, as vivid as when I saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly
shadow gliding close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is
like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay--"Wer nie sein
Brod mit thranen ass."

XVI

Drilled in Roman history--Lovely figures made of light and
morning--What superb figures!--The breath and strength of immeasurable
antiquity--Treasures coming direct from dead hands into mine--A pleasant
sound of coolness and refreshment--Receptacles of death now dedicated
to life--The Borghese is a forest of Ardennes--Profound and important
communings--A smiling deceiver--Of an early-rising habit--Hauling in on
my slack--A miniature cabinet magically made Titanic--"If I had a murder
on my conscience"--None can tell the secret origin of his thoughts--A
singularly beautiful young woman--She actually ripped the man open--No
leagues of chivalry needed in Rome--A resident army--Five foot
six--Corsets and padding--She was wounded in the house of her friends

XVII

Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--Wholly unlike
anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--Back to the Gods and the
Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I
was in a state of some little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most
thorough-going of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An adventure
in Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and saturnine
genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and fireworks--The
Faun--Enjoying Rome--First impressions--Lalla's curses

XVIII

In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail-shells--Broad,
flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow-pipes--Ghostly
yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An ideal bust and a living
one--The enigma of spiritualism--A difficult combination to
overthrow--The dream-child and the Philistine--Dashing and plunging this
way and that--Teresa screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and ghostly
voices--My father would have settled there--Kirkup the necromancer--A
miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The mysterious touch--An
indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was left--Providence takes
very long views

XIX

Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle creature--The
most beautiful woman in the world--Better friends than ever--A shadow
brooded--Boys are whole-souled creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam,
Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New
England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of mishaps--My
father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the fourth, death--Havre,
Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool


ILLUSTRATIONS

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)

BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS

HERMAN MELVILLE

JAMES T. FIELDS

THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife)

EDWIN P. WHIPPLE

JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR

RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES

ROBERT BROWNING

FRANCIS BANNOCH

REV. WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855

MARIA MITCHELL

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY

PENCIL SKETCHES IN ITALY, BY MRS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

THE MARBLE FAUN

HIRAM POWERS




INTRODUCTION


     Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good
     fortune--My father the central figure--What did his gift to
     me cost him?--A revelation in Colorado--Privileges make
     difficulties--Lights and shadows of memory--An informal
     narrative--Contrast between my father's life and mine.

The best use we can make of good fortune is to share it with our
fellows. Those to whom good things come by way of inheritance, however,
are often among the latest to comprehend their own advantage; they
suppose it to be the common condition. And no doubt I had nearly arrived
at man's estate before it occurred to me that the lines of few fishers
of men were cast in places so pleasant as mine. I was the son of a
man of high desert, who had such friends as he deserved; and these
companions and admirers of his gave to me in the beginning of my days
a kindly welcome and encouragement generated from their affection and
reverence for him. Without doing a stroke of work for it, I found myself
early in the enjoyment of a principality of good will and fellowship--a
species of freemasonry, I might call it, though the secret was patent
enough--for the rights in which, unaided, I might have contended my
lifetime long in vain. Men and women whose names are consecrated apart
in the dearest thoughts of thousands were familiars and playmates of my
childhood; they supported my youth and bade my manhood godspeed. But
to me, for a long while, the favor of these gracious giants of mind and
character seemed agreeable indeed, but nothing out of the ordinary; my
tacit presumption was that other children as well as I could if they
would walk hand in hand with Emerson along the village street, seek in
the meadows for arrow-heads with Thoreau, watch Powers thump the brown
clay of the "Greek Slave," or listen to the voice of Charlotte Cushman,
which could sway assembled thousands, modulate itself to tell stories to
the urchin who leaned, rapt, against her knees. Were human felicity so
omnipresent as a happy child imagines it, what a world would this be!

In time, my misapprehension was corrected, rather, I think, through the
application to it of cold logic than by any rude awakening. I learned
of my riches not by losing them--the giants did not withdraw their
graciousness--but by comparing the lot of others with my own. And yet,
to tell the truth--perhaps I might better leave it untold; only in these
chapters, especially, I will not begin with reserves--to say truth,
then, my world, during my father's lifetime, and afterwards for I will
not say how long, was divided into two natural parts, my father being
one of them, and everybody else the other. Hence I was led to regard the
parties of the latter part, rich or poor, giants or pygmies, as being,
after all, of much the same stature and value. The brightness (in the
boy's estimation) of the paternal figure rendered distinctions between
other brightnesses unimportant. The upshot was, in short, that I
inclined to the opinion that while compassion was unquestionably due to
other children for not having a father like mine, yet in other respects
my condition was not egregiously superior to theirs. They might not know
the Brownings or the Julia Ward Howes; but then, very likely, the Smiths
and the Joneses, whom they did know, were nearly as good.

After fifty years, of course, such prepossessions yield to experience.
My father was the best friend I ever had, and he will always stand in
my estimation distinct from all other friends and persons; but I can now
recognize that in addition to the immeasurable debt I owe him for being
to me what he was in his own person, he bestowed upon me a privilege
also immeasurable in the hospitality of these shining ones who were his
intimates. Did the gift cost him nothing? Nothing, in one sense. But,
again, what does it cost a man to walk upright and cleanly during
the years of his pilgrimage: to deal justly with all, and charitably:
diligently to cultivate and develop every natural endowment: always to
seek truth, tell it, and vindicate it: to discharge to the utmost of his
ability every duty that was intrusted to him: to rest content, in the
line of his calling, with no work inferior to his best: to say no word
and do no act which, were they known, might weaken the struggle against
temptation of any fellow-creature? These qualities were the price at
which Hawthorne bought his friends; and in receiving those friends from
him, his children could not but feel that the bequest represented his
unfaltering grasp upon whatever is pure, lofty, and generous in human
life.

Yes, whatever it may cost a man of genius to be all his life a good
man, and to use and develop his genius to the noblest ends only, that my
father's friends cost him, and in that amount am I his debtor; and the
longer I myself live, and the more I see of other men, the higher and
rarer do I esteem the obligation. Moreover, in speaking of his friends,
I was thinking of those who personally knew him; but the world is full
to-day of friends of his who never saw him, to whom his name is my best
and surest introduction. Once, only three years since, in the remote
heart of the Colorado mountains, I chanced to enter the hut of an aged
miner; he sat in a corner of the little family room; on the wall near
his hand was fixed a small bookshelf, filled with a dozen dog-eared
volumes. The man had for years been paralyzed; he could do little more
than to raise to that book-shelf his trembling hand, and take from it
one or other of the volumes. When this helpless veteran learned my name,
he uttered a strange cry, and his face worked with eager emotion; the
wife of his broad-shouldered son brought me to him in his corner; his
old eyes glowed as they perused me. I could not gather the meaning of
his broken, trembling speech; the young woman interpreted for me. Was I
related to the great Hawthorne? "Yes; I am his son." "His son!" Seldom
have I met a gaze harder to sustain than that which the paralytic bent
upon me. Would I might have worn, for the time being, the countenance of
an archangel, so to fill out the lineaments, drawn during so many lonely
years by his imagination and his reverence, of his ideal writer! "The
son of Hawthorne!" He said no more, save by the strengthless pressure of
his hands upon my own; the woman told me how all the books on the little
shelf were my father's books, and for fifteen years the old man had read
no others. Helpless tears of joy, of gratitude, of wonder ran down the
furrows of his cheeks into his white beard. And how could I at whom he
so gazed help being moved: on that desolate, unknown mountain-side, far
from the world, the name which I had inherited was loved and honored!
One does not get one's privileges for nothing. My father gave me power
to make my way, and cast sunshine on the path; but he made the path
arduous, too!

Be that as it may, I now ask who will to look in my mirror, and see
reflected there some of the figures and the scenes that have made my
life worth living. As I peer into the dark abysm of things gone by, many
places that seemed at first indistinct, grow clearer; but many more must
remain impenetrable. Upon the whole, however, I am surprised to find how
much is still discernible. Nearly a score of years ago I published,
in the shape of a formal biography of Hawthorne and his wife, the
consecutive facts of their lives, and numerous passages from their
journals and correspondence. My aim is different now; I wish to indite
an informal narrative from my own point of view, as child, youth, and
man. There will be gaps in it--involuntary ones; and others occasioned
by the obligation to retain those pictures only that seem likely to
arouse a catholic interest. Yet there will be a certain intimacy in the
story; and some matters which history would omit as trivial will be here
adduced, for the sake of such color and character as they may contain.
I shall not stalk on stilts, or mouth phrases, but converse comfortably
and trustfully as between friends. If a writing of this kind be not
flexible, unpretending, discursive, it has no right to be at all. Art is
not in question, save the minor art that lives from line to line. Gossip
about men, women, and things--it can amount to little more than that.

In the earlier chapters the dramatis personae and the incidents must
naturally group themselves about the figure of my father; for it was
thus that I saw them. To his boy he was the fountain of love, honor, and
energy; and to the boy he seemed the animating or organizing principle
of other persons and events. With his death, in my eighteenth year, the
world appeared disordered for a season; then, gradually, I learned to do
my own orientation. I was destined to an experience superficially
much more active and varied than his had been; and it was a world
superficially very different from his in which I moved and dealt
There must follow a corresponding modification in the character of the
narrative; yet that, after all is superficial, too. For the memory of
my father has always been with me, and has doubtless influenced me more
than I am myself aware. And certainly but for him this book would never
have been attempted.




I


     Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's
     decapitation--My mother's strong-box--The spirit of The
     Scarlet Letter--The strain of imaginative composition--My
     grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile indifference to
     calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on Mall
     Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The
     haunted mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The
     upright Egyptian--Mr. Pickwick--My father in 1850--The
     flowered writing-gown, and the ink butterfly--Driving the
     quill pen--The occupants of the second floor--Aunt Louisa
     and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my aunt
     Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book
     of the age.

My maternal aunt, Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was a very learned
woman, and a great student of history, and teacher of it; and by the aid
of huge, colored charts, done by my uncle Nat Peabody and hung on the
walls of our sitting-room, she labored during some years to teach me all
the leading dates of human history--the charts being designed according
to a novel and ingenious plan to fix those facts in childish memory. But
as a pupil I was always most inapt and grievous, in dates and in matters
mathematical especially; so that I gave her inexhaustible patience many
a sad hour. To this day I cannot tell in what year was fought the battle
of Marathon, or when John signed Magna Charta; though the battle itself,
and the scene of the barons with menacing brows gathered about John,
stood clearly pictured in my imagination. Dates were arbitrary, and to
my memory nothing arbitrary would stick. Nevertheless, when I am myself
constructing a narrative, whether it be true or fictitious, I am
wedded to dates, and cannot be divorced from them. It must be set
down precisely when the events took place, in what years the dramatis
personae were born, and how old they were when each juncture of their
fortunes came to pass. I can no more dispense with dates than I can talk
without consonants; they carry form, order, and credibility. Or they
are like the skeleton which gives recognizable shape to men and animals.
Nothing mortal can get on without them..

Whether this addiction be in the nature of a reaction from my childish
perversity, giving my erudite and beloved aunt Lizzie (as I called her)
her revenge so long after our lessons are over; or how else to explain
it, I know not; but it leads me to affirm here that the nadir of my
father's material fortunes was reached about the year 1849. At that time
his age was five-and-forty, and I was three.

The causes of this financial depression were several. One morning he
awoke to find himself deprived, by political chicanery, of the income
of a custom-house surveyorship which for some while past had served
to support his small family. Now, some men could have gone on writing
stories in the intervals between surveying customs, and have thus placed
an anchor to windward against the time when the political storm should
set in; but Nathaniel Hawthorne was devoid of that useful ability. Nor
had he been able to spend less than he earned; so, suddenly, there he
was on his beam-ends. Leisure to write, certainly, was now abundant
enough; but he never was a rapid composer, and even had he been so, the
market for the kind of things he wrote was, in the middle of the past
century, in New England, neither large nor eager. The emoluments were
meagre to match; twenty dollars for four pages of the Democratic Review
was about the figure; and to produce a short tale or sketch of that
length would take him a month at least. How were a husband and wife and
their two children to live for a month on the mere expectation of
twenty dollars from the Democratic Review--which was, into the bargain,
terribly slow pay? Such was the problem which confronted the dark-haired
and grave-visaged gentleman as he closed his desk in the Salem
custom-house for the last time, and put on his hat to walk home.

Thanks, however, to some divine foresight on my mother's part, aided by
a wonderful talent for practical economy, she had secretly contrived
to save, out of her weekly stipends, small sums which in the aggregate
bulked large enough to make an important difference in the situation. So
when her husband disclosed his bad news, she opened her private drawer
and disclosed her banknotes, with such a smile in her eyes as I can
easily picture to myself. Stimulated by the miracle, he remembered that
the inchoate elements of a story, in which was to figure prominently a
letter A, cut out of red cloth, or embroidered in scarlet thread, and
affixed to a woman's bosom, had been for months past rumbling round in
his mind; now was the time of times to shape it forth. Yonder upon the
table by the window stood the old mahogany writing-desk so long unused;
here were his flowered dressing-gown and slippers down-at-heel. He ought
to be able to finish the story before the miraculous savings gave out;
and then all he would have to do would be to write others. And, after
all, to be rid of the surveyorship was a relief.

But matters were not to be run off quite so easily as this. The Scarlet
Letter, upon coming to close quarters with it, turned out to be not a
story of such moderate caliber as Hawthorne had hitherto been used to
write, but an affair likely to extend over two or three hundred pages,
which, instead of a month or so, might not be completed in a year; yet
it was too late to substitute something more manageable for it--in the
first place, because nothing else happened to be at his disposal, and
secondly, because The Scarlet Letter took such intimate hold upon
the vitals of his heart and mind that he was by no means able to free
himself from it until all had been fulfilled. Only men of creative
genius know in what glorious and harrowing thraldom their creations hold
them. Having once been fairly begun, The Scarlet Letter must inevitably
finish itself for good or ill, come what might to the writer of it.

[IMAGE: BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS]

This is a story of people and events, not a study in literary criticism;
but the writing of The Scarlet Letter was an event of no trifling
importance in the story of its author's life. To read the book is an
experience which its readers cannot forget; what its writing must have
been to a man organized as my father was is hardly to be conveyed in
words. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth--he must live through each
one of them, feel their passion, remorse, hatred, terror, love; and he
must enter into the soul of the mysterious nature of Pearl. Such things
cannot with impunity be done by any one; the mere physical strain, all
conditions being favorable, would be almost past bearing. But my father,
though uniformly his bodily health was all his life sound, was never
what I would call a robust man; he was exquisitely balanced. At the time
he began his book he was jaded from years of office drudgery, and he was
in some anxiety as to the issue of his predicament. The house in
which he dwelt, small and ill-placed in a narrow side-street, with no
possibility of shutting out the noise of traffic and of domestic alarms,
could not but make the work tell more heavily upon him. But in addition
to this there were fortuitous occasions of emotional stress, all of
which I shall not mention; but among them were the distasteful turmoil
aroused by his political mishap; and, far more poignant, the critical
illness of his mother. Circumstances led to her being housed under his
roof; there she lingered long at death's door, and there at last she
died. He profoundly loved her; but deep-rooted, too, in both of them was
that strange, New England shyness, masking in visible ice the underlying
emotion. Not since his boyhood had their mutual affection found free,
natural expression; and now, in this final hour, that bondage of habit
caused the words of tenderness to stumble on their lips. The awful
majesty of approaching death, prompting them to "catch up the whole
of love and utter it" ere it be too late, wrought this involuntary
self-repression into silent agony.

She died; his own health was shaken to its foundations; his children
fell ill, his wife underwent acute suffering; and through all this, and
more, The Scarlet Letter must be written. No wonder that, when he came
to read the story in manuscript to his wife, his voice faltered and
broke; and she slipped to her knees and hid her face on her arms in the
chair. "I had been suffering," he commentated, long afterwards, "from
a great diversity and severity of emotion." Great works of art--things
with the veritable spirit of enduring life in them--are destined to be
born in sore travail and pain. Those who give them birth yield up their
own life to them.

It was at this period--say, about 1850--that my own personal
recollections, in a shadowy and incoherent way, begin. The shadows are
exclusively of time's making; they were not of the heart. All through
the trials of my parents I retained a jocund equanimity (save for some
trifling childish ailments) and esteemed this world a friendly and
agreeable place. The Scarlet Letter dashed my spirits not a whit; I
knew not of its existence, by personal evidence, till full a dozen years
later; and even the death of my grandmother left me light of heart, for
the passing of the spirit from the body can but awaken the transient
curiosity of a child of four. For the rest, my physical environment, in
itself amusing and interesting enough to me, had its chief importance
from the material it afforded on which to construct the imaginary
scenes and characters of my play. My sister Una and myself were forever
enacting something or somebody not ourselves: childish egoism oddly
decking itself in the non-ego. We believed in fairies, in magic, in
angels, in transformations; Hans Christian Andersen, Grimm, The Black
Aunt (oh, delectable, lost volume) were our sober history-books, and
Robinson Crusoe was our autobiography. But I did occasionally take note
of concrete appearances, too; and some of them I remember.

The house--the third which we had inhabited since my father became
surveyor--was on Mall Street, and was three stories in height, with a
yard behind and at one end; this yard, which was of importance to my
sister and myself, had access to the street by a swinging gate. There
were three or four trees in it, and space for play. The house was but
one room deep, and lying as it did about north and south, the rooms were
open to both the morning and the afternoon sunshine. They opened one
into the other in a series; and when my father was safe up-stairs in
his study, my mother would open all the doors of the suite on the lower
floor, and allow the children to career triumphantly to and fro. No
noise that we could make ever troubled her nerves, unless it was the
noise of conflict; the shriek of joy, however shrill, passed by her
harmless; but the lowest mutter of wrath or discontent distressed her;
for of such are the mothers of the kingdom of heaven! And so zealous was
our regard for her just and gentle law that I really think we gave way
as little as most children to the latter.

Of course, whenever the weather permitted, we were out in the yard,
or even promenaded for short distances up and down the street. And
once--"How are you?" inquired a friend of the family, as he drove by
in his wagon. "Oh, we've got the scarlet fever!" we proudly replied,
stepping out gallantly along the sidewalk. For we were treated by a
homoeopathic doctor of the old school, who was a high-dilutionist, and
mortal ills could never get a firm grip on us. In winter we rejoiced in
the snow; and my father's story of the Snow Image got most of its local
color from our gambols in this fascinating substance, which he could
observe from the window of his study.

The study was on the third floor of the house, secluded from the turmoil
of earth, so far as anything could be in a city street. No one
was supposed to intrude upon him there; but such suppositions are
ineffectual against children. From time to time the adamantine gates
fell ajar, and in we slipped. It seemed a heavenly place, tenanted by a
being possessed of every attribute that our imaginations could ascribe
to an angel. The room and its tenant glimmer before me as I write,
luminous with the sunshine of more than fifty years ago. Both were
equipped for business rather than for beauty; furniture and garments
were simple in those Salem days. A homely old paper covered the walls, a
brownish old carpet the floor. There was an old rocking-chair, its black
paint much worn and defaced; another chair was drawn up to the table,
which stood to the left of the eastern window; and on the table was a
mahogany desk, concerning which I must enter into some particulars.
It was then, and for years afterwards, an object of my most earnest
scrutiny. Such desks are not made nowadays.

When closed, it was an oblong mahogany box, two feet long by half that
width, and perhaps nine inches high. It had brass corners, and a brass
plate on the top, inscribed with the name, "N. Hawthorne." At one end
was a drawer, with a brass handle playing on a hinge and fitting into
a groove or socket when down; there was a corresponding handle at the
other end, but that was for symmetry only; the one drawer went clear
through the desk. I often mused over the ethics of this deception.

Being opened, the desk presented a sloping surface two feet square,
covered with black velvet, which had been cut here and there and pasted
down again, and was stiffened with many ink-spatterings. This writing
surface consisted of two lids, hinged at their junction in the centre;
lifting them, you discovered two receptacles to hold writing-paper and
other desk furniture. They were of about equal capacity; for although
the upper half of the desk was the more capacious, you must not forget
that two inches of it, at the bottom, was taken up by the long drawer
already mentioned.

But there was, also, a more interesting curtailment of this interior
space. Along the very top of the desk, as it lay open, was a narrow
channel, perhaps a couple of inches wide and deep, divided into three
sections; two square ones, at the opposite ends, held the ink-bottle and
the sand-bottle; the long central one was for quill pens. These, in
the aggregate, appeared to the superficial eye to account for all that
remained of the cubic contents of the structure; but the supreme mystery
and charm of the affair was that they did not!

No; there was an esoteric secret still in reserve; and for years it
remained a secret to me. The bottle-sockets and pen-tray did not reach
down to the level of the long drawer by nearly an inch. Measurement
would prove that; but you would have said that the interval must be
solid wood; for nothing but a smooth panel met the eye when you pulled
aside the sheets of writing-paper in their receptacle to investigate.
But the lesson of this world, and of the desk as a part of it, is that
appearances are not to be trusted. The guile of those old desk-makers
passes belief.

I will expose it. In the pen-tray lay a sort of brass nail, as long as
your little finger, and blunt at the end. Now take the sand-bottle from
its hole. In one corner of the bottom thereof you will see a minute
aperture, just big enough to admit the seemingly useless brass nail.
Stick it in and press hard. With an abrupt noise that makes you jump, if
you are four or five years old, that smooth, unsuspected strip of
panel starts violently forward (propelled by a released spring) and
reveals--what? Nothing less than the fronts of two minute drawers. They
fit in underneath the pen-tray, and might remain undiscovered for a
hundred years unless you had the superhuman wit to divine the purpose of
the brass nail. The drawers contain diamonds, probably, or some closely
folded document making you the heir to a vast estate. As a matter of
fact, I don't know what they contained; the surprise of the drawers
themselves was enough for me. I need not add that I did not guess the
riddle myself; but nothing that I can call to mind impressed me more
than when, one day, my father solved it for me with his little brass
wand. At intervals, afterwards, I was allowed to work the miracle
myself, always with the same thrill of mysterious delight. The desk was
human to me; it was alive.

There were little square covers for the ink and sand-bottles; and on
the under sides of these were painted a pair of faces; very ruddy in the
cheeks they were, with staring eyes and smiling mouths; and one of them
wore a pair of black side-whiskers. They were done by my father, with
oil--colors filched from my mother's paint-box. They seemed to me
portraits of the people who lived in the desk; evidently they enjoyed
their existence hugely. And when I considered that the desk was also
somehow instrumental in the production of stories--such as the Snow
Image--of a delectable and magical character, the importance to my mind
of the whole contrivance may be conceived. When I grew beyond child's
estate, I learned that it had also assisted at the composition of The
Scarlet Letter. If ever there were a haunted writing-desk, this should
have been it; but the ghosts have long since carried it away, whither I
know not.

On the table were two ornaments; one, the finely moulded figure of
an Egyptian in bronze, the wide Egyptian head-dress falling on the
shoulders, the arms lying rigidly at the sides, with fists clinched.
Generations of handling had made it almost black, but the amiable
expression of the little countenance--the figure was about seven inches
tall--greatly endeared it to me. Its feet were pressed close together
on a small round stand; but one day somebody set it down on a hot stove,
where it remained without flinching till the feet were melted off. After
some years my mother had an ebony stump affixed to it, preserving the
proportions of the figure and setting it once more erect. He was of
greater endurance and of finer physical if not of moral development than
the Tin Soldier of Hans Christian Andersen. The other ornament, less
than half the Egyptian's size, and also made of bronze, was a warrior in
mediaeval armor, whose head lifted off, showing a sharp-pointed rod
the sheath of which was the body. Its use was to pick the wicks of the
oil-lamps of that epoch, and its name was Mr. Pickwick. When afterwards
I became acquainted with the world's Mr. Pickwick, I supposed his
creator had adopted the name from our bronze warrior; but the world's
Pickwick was made of stuff more enduring than bronze; he remains, but
our little warrior has vanished.

I come now to the human occupant of this chamber of marvels. I see a
tall, strong man, whose wide-domed head was covered with wavy black
hair, bushing out at the sides. It thinned somewhat over the lofty crown
and brow; the forehead was hollowed at the temple and rounded out above,
after the Moorish style of architecture. Under heavy, dark eyebrows were
eyes deep-set and full of light, marvellous in range of expression,
with black eyelashes. All seemed well with me when I met their look. The
straight, rather salient nose had a perceptible cleft at the tip, which,
I was told, was a sign of good lineage; muddy-mettled rascals lacked it;
so that I was much distressed by the smooth, plebeian bluntness, at that
time, of my own little snub. The mouth, then unshaded by a mustache,
had a slight upward turn at the corners, indicative of vitality and
good-humor; the chin rounded out sharply convex from the lip. The round,
strong column of the neck well supported the head; my mother compared it
with that of the Apollo Belvedere, a bust of which stood in the corner
of our sitting-room. The head was deep--a great distance between the
base of the ear and the wing of the nostril--and was well filled out
behind. Above the blue of the shaven beard the complexion showed clear
white and red, announcing a strong heart and good digestion. My father
shaved himself daily; I was not permitted to see the operation, but
I knew he lathered, and wondered why. He was naturally athletic;
broad-shouldered and deep in the chest, lean about the loins, weighing
never over one hundred and eighty pounds; his height was five feet ten
and three-quarter inches; his legs and feet were slender and graceful,
his gait long and springy, and he could stand and leap as high as his
shoulder. In the house he wore slippers, which seemed always old and
down-at-heel.

In the house, also, he wore a writing-gown, made for him some years
before by my mother; it reached nearly to his heels, and had been a
gorgeous affair, though now much defaced. The groundwork was purple,
covered all over with conventional palm-leaf in old-gold color; the
lining was red. This lining, under the left-hand skirt of the gown, was
blackened with ink over a space as large as your hand; for the author
was in the habit of wiping his pen thereon; but my mother finally
parried this attack by sewing in the centre of the place a penwiper in
the shape of a butterfly.

While story-writing, the door of the study was locked against all the
world; but after noon he became approachable, except during The Scarlet
Letter period, when he wrote till evening. He did not mind my seeing him
write letters; he would sit with his right shoulder and head inclined
towards the desk; the quill squeaked softly over the smooth paper, with
frequent quick dips into the ink-bottle; a few words would be written
swiftly; then a pause, with suspended pen, while the next sentence was
forming in the writer's mind. When he miswrote, instead of crossing out
the word, he would smear it out with his finger, and rewrite over
the smear; so that his page had a mottled appearance. The writing was
accompanied by intermittent nods of the head, as one would say, "Sic
cogito!" So far as he is concerned, the shadows close in on me here.

But I have said that the house was of three stories, and I have
accounted for two of them only. The second was occupied by my
grandmother Hawthorne and her two daughters, Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe
(the latter appellation being an infantile version of her name invented
by my father, who was her junior, and used by us to distinguish between
her and that other Elizabeth who was Aunt Lizzie Peabody). Of my
grandmother Hawthorne I have no personal recollection at all; she was
a Manning, a beautiful old lady, whom her son resembled. She had been
a recluse from society for forty years; it was held to be good form, in
that age and place, to observe such Hindoo rites after the death of a
husband; hers had died in his thirty-fourth year in Surinam. But she
had also insensibly fallen into the habit of isolating herself in some
degree from her own family; they were all of them addicted to solitude
of the body, though kindly enough disposed in the abstract. When we
went to live in the Mall Street house, the old lady and her daughters
uprooted themselves from their home of many years in Herbert Street and
dwelt with us; and that quaint crystallization of their habits was in a
measure broken up. But the dowager Mrs. Hawthorne, it soon appeared, had
come there to die; she was more than seventy years old. My aunt Louisa I
seem dimly to recall as a tall, fragile, pale, amiable figure, not very
effective. My aunt Ebe I afterwards came to know well, and shall defer
mention of her. So I was encompassed by kindly petticoats, and was very
happy, but might have been better for a stout playmate of my own sex.
I had a hobby-horse, which I rode constantly to fairy-land in quest of
treasure to bestow upon my friends. I swung with Una on the gate, and
looked out upon the wonder of the passing world. The tragedy of my
grandmother's death, which, as I have said, interrupted the birth of
The Scarlet Letter, passed me by unknowing, or rather without leaving a
trace upon my memory. On the other hand, I can reconstitute vividly two
absurd incidents, destitute of historical value. After my grandmother
Hawthorne's death I fell ill; but the night before the disease declared
itself, I was standing in a chair at the nursery window, looking out at
the street-lamp on the corner, and my aunt Lizzie Peabody, who had just
come on from Boston, was standing behind me, lest I should fall off.
Now, I was normally the most sweet-tempered little urchin imaginable;
yet suddenly, without the faintest warning or provocation, I turned
round and dealt my loving aunt a fierce kick in the stomach. It deprived
her of breath for a space; but her saintly nature is illustrated by the
fact that the very first use she made of her recovered faculties was
to gasp out, "Sophie, the child must be ill!" Fortunately for my
reputation, the illness was not long in arriving. The other episode must
have happened at about the same period, and is likewise concerned with
Aunt Lizzie. We had a cat, and the cat had had kittens a day or two
before. Aunt Lizzie came into the nursery, where Una and I were building
houses of blocks, and sat down in the big easy-chair. The cat was in
the room, and she immediately came up to my aunt and began to mew and to
pluck at her dress with her claws. Such attentions were rare on pussy's
part, and my aunt noticed them with pleasure, and caressed the animal,
which still continued to devote its entire attention to her. But there
was something odd in the sound of her mewing and in the intent regard of
her yellow eyes. "Can anything be the matter with pussy?" speculated
my aunt. At that moment my father entered the room, and my aunt rose to
greet him. Then the massacre was revealed, for she had been sitting upon
the kittens. Their poor mother pounced upon them with a yowl, but it
was too late. My dear aunt was rather a heavy woman, and she had been
sitting there fifteen minutes. We all stood appalled in the presence of
the great mystery.


One day a big man, with a brown beard and shining brown eyes, who
bubbled over with enthusiasm and fun, made his appearance and talked
volubly about something, and went away again, and my father and mother
smiled at each other. The Scarlet Letter had been written, and James
T. Fields had read it, and declared it the greatest book of the age. So
that was the last of Salem.




II


     Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea
     might have done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--
     The Unpardonable Sin and the Deathless Man--The little red
     house--Materials of culture--Our best playmates--The mystery
     of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual hen--Fishing for
     poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the
     ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--
     Nuts--Giants and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes,
     ambrosial breath--My first horseback ride--Herman Melville's
     stories--Another kind of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning
     ladies and melancholy sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I
     abominate the sight of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The
     truth of fiction--An eighteen-months' work--We leave five
     cats behind.

Horatio Bridge, my father's college friend, was a purser in the navy and
lived in Augusta, Maine, his official residence being at Portsmouth. He
had kept in closer touch with the romancer than any of his other friends
had since their graduating days, and he had been from the first a
believer in his coming literary renown. So, when The Scarlet Letter
shone eminent in the firmament of book-land, it was his triumphant
"I-told-you-so" that was among the earliest to be heard. And when my
father cast about for a more congenial place than Salem to live in, it
was to Bridge that he applied for suggestions. He stipulated that the
place should be somewhere along the New England sea-coast.

Had this wish of his been fulfilled it might have made great
differences. Hawthorne had always dwelt within sight and sound of the
Atlantic, on which his forefathers had sailed so often between the
Indies and Salem port, and Atlantic breezes were necessary to his
complete well-being. At this juncture physical health had for the first
time become an object to him; he was run down by a year of suffering and
hard work, and needed nature's kindest offices. A suitable house of
his own by the sea-side would probably have brought him up to his best
physical condition to begin with, and kept him so; and it would so have
endeared itself to him that when, two or three years later, Pierce had
offered him a foreign appointment he might have been moved to decline
it, and have gone on writing American romances to the end--to the
advantage of American letters. Concord had its own attractions; but it
never held him as the sea would have done, nor nourished his health, nor
stimulated his genius. A house of his own beside the Atlantic might well
have added twenty years to his life.

But it was not upon the knees of the gods.

Bridge's zealous efforts failed to find a place available, and after an
uneasy interval, during which his friend wandered uncomfortably about
Boston and the neighborhood (incidentally noting down some side-scenes
afterwards to be incorporated in The Blithedale Romance), a cottage
in the Berkshire Hills was spoken of, and upon examination seemed
practicable. Lenox, at that time, was as little known as Mount Desert;
it was not until long afterwards that fashion found them out and made
them uninhabitable to any but fashionable folks. Moreover, my father had
seen something of Lenox a dozen years before.

A dozen years before he was not yet betrothed to Sophia Peabody; he
already loved her and she him; but her health seemed an insuperable
barrier between them. This and certain other matters were weighing
heavily upon his soul, and his future seemed dark and uncertain. He
thought of taking a voyage round the world; he thought of getting into
politics; he even thought--as young men full of life sometimes will--of
death. What he finally did, with native good sense, was to make a
two-months' trip in the mountainous region to the westward, to change
the scene and his state of mind, and to get what artists call a fresh
eye. He chose North Adams as his headquarters, and forayed thence in
various directions over a radius of twenty miles. He was then beginning
to revolve one of the two great romance themes that preoccupied his
whole after-life, neither of which was he destined to write. This was
the idea of the Unpardonable Sin; the other was the conception of the
Deathless Man. The only essay we have towards the embodiment of the
first vision is the short fragment published in Mosses from an Old
Manse, called "Ethan Brand." The other was attempted in various forms,
of which Septimius, Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, and The Dolliver Romance,
all posthumously published, are the most important.

But Stockbridge, Pittsfield, and Lenox had been included among his
haunts during the break-away above mentioned, and he remembered that the
scenery was beautiful, the situation remote, and the air noble. Next to
the sea it seemed an ideal place to recuperate and write in. Thither,
at all events, he resolved to go, and early in the summer of 1850 we
arrived at the little red house above the shores of Stockbridge Bowl,
with bag and baggage. Little though the house was, the bag and baggage
were none too much to find easy accommodation in it.

A fair-sized city drawing-room of these sumptuous contemporary days
could stow away in a corner the entire structure which then became our
habitation, and retain space enough outside it for the exploitation of
social functions. Nevertheless, by the simple expedient of making the
interior divisions small enough, this liliputian edifice managed to
contain eight rooms on its two floors (including the kitchen). One of
the rooms was, in fact, the entrance-hall; you stepped into it across
the threshold of the outer door, and the staircase ascended from it. It
was used as an extension of the drawing-room, which opened out of it.
The drawing-room adjoined the dining-room, with windows facing the
west, with a view of the mountains across the lake, and the dining-room
communicated with the kitchen. One of the western-looking up-stairs
rooms served as my father's study; my sister Una had her chamber, I mine
(which was employed as the guest-chamber upon occasion), and our parents
the other. What more could be asked? for when Rose was born, her crib
stood beside her mother's bedstead.

When we were not asleep--that is, during twelve hours out of the
twenty-four--Una's existence and mine were passed mainly in the outer
sitting-room and in the dining-room. There was plenty to entertain us.
I had my rocking-horse, which I bestrode with perfect fearlessness; my
porcelain lion, which still survives unscathed after the cataclysms
of half a century; my toy sloop, made for me by Uncle Nat; and a
jack-knife, all but the edge and point, which had been removed out of
deference to my youth. Una had a doll, a miniature mahogany centre-table
and bureau, and other things in which I felt no interest. In common,
we possessed the box of wooden bricks, and the big portfolio containing
tracings by my mother, exquisitely done, of Flaxman's "Outlines of the
Iliad and Odyssey" and other classic subjects. We knew by heart the
story of all these mythological personages, and they formed a large
part of our life. They also served the important use of suggesting to my
father his Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales stories, and, together with
the figures of Gothic fairy-lore, they were the only playmates, with the
exception of our father and mother, that we had or desired.

But our father and mother were, of course, the main thing, after all.
She was with us all day long; he, from the time he stopped writing,
early in the afternoon, till our bed-time. They answered all our
questions about things animate and inanimate, physical and metaphysical;
and that must have taken time, for our curiosity was magnificent; and
"The Old Boy," my father records, "asked me today what were sensible
questions--I suppose with a view to asking me some." They superintended
our projections of creation on the black-board--a great, old-fashioned
black-board, the like of which I have not since beheld; they read to us
and told us stories. Many of these stories were of incidents of their
own child-life; and there was also the narrative of our mother's voyage
to Cuba and back, and residence there when she was about eighteen or
twenty--a fascinating chronicle. Meal-times were delectable festivals,
not only because the bread-and-milk, the boiled rice and tapioca
pudding, and eggs and fruit tasted so good, but by reason of the broad
outlook out of window over the field, the wood, the lake, and the
mountains; supper-time, with the declining sun pouring light into
the little room and making the landscape glorious, was especially
exhilarating. Ambrosial was the bread baked by Mrs. Peters, the taciturn
and serious religious person of color who attended to our cooking; the
prize morsels were the ends, golden brown in hue, crunching so crisply
between our teeth. I used to wonder how a being with hands so dark as
those of Mrs. Peters managed to turn out dough so immaculate. She would
plunge them right into the ivory-hued substance, yet it became only
whiter than before. But the life of life was, of course, out-doors.
There was a barn containing a hay-mow and a large hen-coop, soon
populous with hens and chickens, with an heroic snow-white rooster to
keep them in order. Hens are the most audacious and presuming of pets,
and they have strong individuality.

One of our brood was more intellectual and enterprising than the others;
she found a way of getting out of the coop, no matter how tightly it
was shut up; and she would jump in our laps as we sat eating a piece
of bread in the barn doorway and snatch it away from us; but I think we
sometimes sat there with the bread on purpose to have her do it. Once or
twice--until I was detected and stopped--I enjoyed the poignant delight
of fishing for hens out of the barn loft; my tackle consisted of a bent
pin at the end of a string tied to a stick. It was baited with a grain
of corn, or a bit of rag would do as well, for hens have no hereditary
suspicion of anglers, and are much more readily entrapped than fishes.
Pulling them up, squawking and fluttering, was thrilling, but, of
course, it was wrong, like other thrilling things, and had to be
foregone. A less unregenerate experiment was fastening two grains of
corn to the ends of a long bit of thread; two hens would seize each
a grain and begin swallowing thread until they interfered, with each
other, when a disgorgement would take place. It was an economical
sport--the one bit of thread and the two corn-grains would last all
day--and, in view of the joy afforded to the spectators, did not seem
too unkind. My father had mechanical talent, and with an old door-knob
and some strips of shingle he would make a figure of a man with a saw;
you fixed it to the edge of a table, set the door-knob swinging, and the
creature would saw with the most absurd diligence. From the same shingle
he would construct a pugilist, who, being set up where the wind played
upon him, would swing his arms interminably. It was yacht-building,
however, that afforded us most entertainment. A shingle was whittled to
a point at one end; a stick with a square paper slipped on it was stuck
up in the middle, and a rudder made fast to the stern; such a boat would
sail boldly out upon the vastness of the lake, till the eye could no
longer follow the diminishing white speck. These days beside the lake
were full of good things. The water was clear, with a white sand bottom;
we were given swimming-lessons in the hot summer weather; having waded
in up to our middles, we faced towards the shore, where sat our father
with a long fishing-pole, the end of which he kept within our reach,
and bade us lean forward on the water and kick up our feet. But, for my
part, I kept one foot on the bottom. It was not till years afterwards
that I mustered courage to take it off, and that was in a lake three
thousand miles from Stockbridge Bowl, with the towers of the castle of
Chillon reflected in its calm surface.

We also made limited use of a leaky old punt, which one day capsized and
emptied its whole crew into the water, luckily close to shore. We fished
for gold carp for hours together, and during our two summers we caught a
couple of them; there were thousands of them swimming about; but a bent
pin with the bait washed off is not a good lure. In winter, the lake had
five feet of ice on it, which lasted far into the spring, and once or
twice we got aboard this great raft and tracked across it, with as much
awe and enthusiasm as ever Kane had felt in his arctic explorations. In
all, we became intimate friends with the lake idea, new to us then, but
never to grow stale; and our good fortune favored us during after-life
with many lovely lakes and ponds, including such gems as Rydal, Walden,
and Geneva.

Water, in another enchanting guise, dashed and gurgled for us in the
brook that penetrated like a happy dream the slumber of the forest that
bordered on the lake. The wooded declivity through which it went was
just enough to keep it ever vocal and animated. Gazing down upon it, it
was clear brown, with glancing gleams of interior green, and sparkles
diamond white; tiny fishes switched themselves against the current with
quivering tails; the shaggy margins were flecked with sunshine, and
beautiful with columbines, violets, arbutus, and houstonias. Fragments
of rock and large pebbles interrupted its flow and deepened its mellow
song; above it brooded the twilight of the tall pines and walnuts,
responding to its merriment with solemn murmurings. What playfellow is
more inexhaustible than such a brook, so full of life, of motion, of
sound and color, of variety and constancy. A child welcomes it as an
answer to its own soul, with its mystery and transparency, its bounded
lawlessness, its love of earth and its echoes of the sky. In winter our
brook had a new charm: it ran beneath a roof of ice, often mounded with
snow; its voice sounding cheerful as ever in those inscrutable caverns,
as if it discoursed secret wonders of fairy-land, and carried treasures
of the elves and gnomes. Zero, with his utmost rigors, could not still
its speech for a day or fix his grip upon those elastic limbs. Indeed,
the frosty god conspired with it for our delight; building crystal
bridges, with tracery of lace delicater than Valenciennes, and spangled
string-pieces, and fretted vaultings, whimsical sierras, stalactite and
stalagmite. An icicle is one of those careless toys of nature which
the decorative art of man imitates in vain. They are among the myriad
decorations of children's palaces.

To Tanglewood, as we called it, at all seasons of the year, came
Hawthorne and his wife and children. In spring there was the issuing
forth of the new life from beneath the winter coverlid; the first
discovery of sociable houstonias, and the exquisite tints and fragrance
of the mayflower on its dark, bearded stalk. When June became perfect,
and afterwards till nuts were ripe, my father loved to lie at full
length upon the mossy and leaf-strewn floor, looking up at the green
roof, the lofty whispering-gallery of vaulted boughs, with its azure
lattices and descending sunlight-shafts; wrapped in imaginings some of
which were afterwards to delight the world; but many more of them, no
doubt, were fated to join the glorious company of untold tales. Beside
him sat our mother, on a throne which we had fashioned for her from the
upright stump of a tree; round about them played the little girl and
boy. They brought all the treasures which this wonderfully affluent
world afforded: flowers in all seasons; strawberries, small but of
potent flavor, which the little boy would gather with earnest diligence,
and fetch to the persons he loved, mashed into premature jam in his
small fist; exciting turtles with variegated carapaces, and heads and
feet that went in and out; occasional newts from the plashy places; and
in autumn, hatfuls of walnuts. There were chestnuts, too, upon whose
prickly hulls the preoccupied children would sometimes inadvertently
plump themselves. Our father was a great tree-climber, and he was also
fond of playing the role of magician. "Hide your eyes!" he would say,
and the next moment, from being there beside us on the moss, we would
hear his voice descending from the sky, and behold! he swung among the
topmost branches, showering down upon us a hail-storm of nuts. There was
a big cavern behind the kitchen chimney, which gradually became filled
with these harvests, and on winter evenings they were brought forth and
cracked with a hammer on the hearth-stone.

The wide field, or croft, which sloped from the house to the wood was
thickly grown with mullein-stalks, against which I waged war with an
upper section of one of my father's old broken canes, for I took them
for giants, and stubborn, evil-minded enchanters. I slew them by scores;
but I could make no way against the grasshoppers, which jumped against
my bare legs and pricked them. There were wasps, too; one of them stung
Una on the lower lip as she was climbing over a rail-fence. Her lip at
once assumed a Bourbon contour, and I reached the conclusion, by some
tacit syllogism of infancy, that the rail-fence was at least half to
blame for the catastrophe, and always carefully avoided it. I likewise
avoided the wasps; a certain trick they have of giving a hitch to their
after-parts as they walk along always struck me as being obviously
diabolical.

When the snows came, two and three feet deep, we got out the family
sled from its summer lodging in the barn and went forth, muffled in
interminable knit tippets and other woollen armor, to coast down the
long slope. Our father sat in front with the reins in his hands and his
feet thrust out to steer, and away we went clinging fast behind him.
Sometimes we swept triumphantly to the bottom; at other times we
would collide with some hidden obstacle, and describe each a separate
trajectory into the snow-banks. We made enormous snow-balls by beginning
with a small one and rolling it over and over in the soft snow till
it waxed too vast for our strength; two or three of these piled one on
another would be sculptured by the author of The Scarlet Letter into a
snow-man, who would stand stanch for weeks. Snow-storms in Lenox began
early and lasted till far into April. The little red house had all it
could do, sometimes, to lift its upper windows above them. In the front
yard there was a symmetrical balsam fir-tree, tapering like a Chinese
pagoda. One winter morning we found upon one of its lower boughs a
little brown sparrow frozen stiff. We put it in a card-board coffin, and
dug out a grave for it beneath the fir, with a shingle head-stone. The
funeral ceremonies had for the two mourners a solemnity such as is not
always felt at such functions in later life.

Of the regular daily routine was the journey to Luther Butler's, quarter
of a mile up the road, for milk and butter. I generally accompanied
my father, and saw placid Luther's cows, placid as himself, with their
broad, wet noses, amiable dark eyes, questionable horns, and ambrosial
breath. Mr. Tappan, our landlord, had horses, and once he mounted me on
the bare back of one of the largest of these quadrupeds, which, to the
stupefaction of everybody, instantly set off at full gallop. Down
the road we thundered, the rider, with his legs sticking out at right
angles, screaming with joy, for this transcended any rocking-horse
experiences. A hundred yards away there was a bend in the road. Just at
that point there was a manure-pile, which had long bided its time. I had
hold of a strand of the horse's mane; but when he swerved at the bend I
had to let go, and after a short flight in air, the manure-pile received
me in its soft embrace. Looking up the road, I saw Mr. Tappan, with
dilated eyes and a countenance expressing keen emotion, coming towards
me at a wonderful pace, and my father and mother following him at a
short distance. I did not myself mind the smell of manure, and the
others were glad to put up with it in consideration of my having escaped
broken bones.

We did not keep a dog, but Herman Melville, who often came over from
Pittsfield, had a large Newfoundland which he sometimes brought with,
him, and Mr. G. P. R. James, a novelist of the Walter Scott school, had
another, and I was permitted to bestride both of them; they were safe
enough, but they would turn back their heads and lay their cold noses on
my leg; I preferred the now-forbidden horse. But Melville himself made
up for everything by the tremendous stories he used to tell about the
South Sea Islands and the whale fishery. Normally he was not a man of
noticeable appearance; but when the narrative inspiration was on him, he
looked like all the things he was describing--savages, sea-captains, the
lovely Fayaway in her canoe, or the terrible Moby Dick himself. There
was vivid genius in this man, and he was the strangest being that ever
came into our circle. Through all his wild and reckless adventures,
of which a small part only got into his fascinating books, he had been
unable to rid himself of a Puritan conscience; he afterwards tried to
loosen its grip by studying German metaphysics, but in vain. He was
restless and disposed to dark hours, and there is reason to suspect
that there was in him a vein of insanity. His later writings were
incomprehensible. When we were living in England, he passed through the
midst of us on one of his aimless, mysterious journeys round the world;
and when I was in New York, in 1884, I met him, looking pale, sombre,
nervous, but little touched by age. He died a few years later. He
conceived the highest admiration for my father's genius, and a deep
affection for him personally; but he told me, during our talk, that he
was convinced that there was some secret in my father's life which had
never been revealed, and which accounted for the gloomy passages in
his books. It was characteristic in him to imagine so; there were many
secrets untold in his own career. But there were few honester or more
lovable men than Herman Melville.

[IMAGE: HERMAN MELVILLE]

James (no relation of our distinguished contemporary) was a commonplace,
meritorious person, with much blameless and intelligent conversation;
but the only thing that recalls him personally to my memory is the fact
of his being associated with a furious thunder-storm. My father and I
were alone in the house at the time; my mother had gone to West Newton
on a three weeks' visit. In the midst of the thunder and lightning, the
downpour and the hurricane, the crash of matter and the wreck of worlds,
our door burst open, and behold! of all persons in the world to be
heralded by such circumstances, G. P. R. James! Not he only, but close
upon his heels his entire family, numerous, orthodox, admirable, and
infinitely undesirable to two secluded gentlemen without a wife
and mother to help them out. But it was a choice between murder and
hospitality, and come in they must. Never before or after did our
liliputian drawing-room harbor so large an assemblage. They dripped on
the carpet, they were conventional and courteous; we made conversation
between us; but whenever the thunder rolled, Mrs. James became ghastly
pale. Mr. James explained that this was his birthday, and that they were
on a pleasure excursion. He conciliated me by anecdotes of a pet magpie
or raven who stole spoons. At last, the thunder-storm and the G. P. R.
Jameses passed off together.

There were many other visitors, not only old friends, but persons
attracted thither out of the void by the fame of the book "along whose
burning leaves," as Oliver Wendell Holmes sang of it, "his scarlet web
our wild romancer weaves." It was a novel experience for the man who had
become accustomed to regarding himself as the obscurest man of letters
in America. Lonely, yearning ladies came; enthusiastic young men;
melancholy sinners. The little red house was not a literary Mecca only,
but a moral one. The dark-browed, kindly smiling author received them
all courteously; he was invariably courteous. "I would not have a
drunken man politer than I," he once answered me, when I asked him why
he had returned the salutation of a toper. What counsel he gave to
those who came to him as to a father confessor of course I know not; but
later, when I used to sit in his office in the Liverpool consulate,
I sometimes heard him speak plain truths to the waifs and strays who
drifted in there; and truth more plain, yet bestowed with more humanity
and brotherly purpose, I have never heard since. It made them tremble,
but it did them good. Such things made him suffer, but he never
flinched from the occasion by a hair's-breadth. He must have loved his
fellow-creatures.

Somebody gave me a rabbit, which I named Hind-legs. I was deeply
interested in him for a while, especially when I learned that he could
not drink water; but he lasted only two weeks, and I am under the
impression that I killed him. Not that I loved him less; but children
are prone to experiment with this singular thing called life when it
is in their power. They do not believe that death can be other than
a transient phenomenon; the lifeless body may puzzle, but it does not
convince them. I was certainly not a cruel urchin, and I can recall
none but cordial sentiments towards Hindlegs on my part. I remember no
details of the murder, if murder were done; but I do remember feeling
no surprise when, one morning, Hindlegs was found dead. After so many
years, I will not bring against the owner of Hindlegs a verdict of
positive guilt; but I suspect him. Hindlegs, at all events, achieved
an immortality which can belong to few of his brethren; for my father,
after pooh-poohing the imbecile little bundle of fur for a day or two,
conceived an involuntary affection for him, and reported his character
and habits in his journal in a manner which is likely to keep his memory
alive long after the hand that (perhaps) slew him is dust.

In default of dogs and Hindlegs, we had abundant cats. My father was
always fond of these mysterious deities of ancient Egypt, and they were
never turned away from our doors; but how so many of them happened
to find us out in this remote region I cannot explain. It seems as if
goodwill towards cats spontaneously generated them. They appeared, one
after another, to the number of five; but when the time came for us to
leave the red house forever, the cats would not and could not be packed
up, and they were left behind. In my mind's eye I still see them,
squatting abreast, silhouetted against the sky, on the brow of the hill
as we drove down the road; for they had scampered after our carry-all
when we drove away. Cats teach Americans what they are slow to
learn--the sanctity and permanence of home.

But Lenox could not be a home for us. It was, indeed, a paradise for
the children; but the children's father was never well there. He had a
succession of colds--as those affections are called; it was ascribed to
the variations of temperature during the summers; but the temperature
would not have troubled him had he not been hard hit before he went
to Berkshire. He got out of patience with the climate, and was wont
to anathematize it with humorous extravagance, as his way was: "It is
horrible. One knows not for ten minutes together whether he is too cool
or too warm. I detest it! I hate Berkshire with my whole soul. Here,
where I had hoped for perfect health, I have for the first time been
made sensible that I cannot with impunity encounter nature in all her
moods." It was the summers that disagreed with him. "Upon the whole,"
he said, "I think that the best time for living in the country is the
winter." It was during the winter that he did most of his writing. The
House of the Seven Gables was written between September of 1850 and
January or February of 1851.

But composition took more out of him than formerly. He admitted to his
sister Louisa that he was "a little worn down with constant work," and
added that he could not afford any idle time now, being evidently of the
opinion that his popularity would be short-lived, and that it behooved
him, therefore, to make the most of it. But "the pen is so constantly
in my fingers that I abominate the sight of it!" he exclaimed. This was
after he had transgressed his custom of never writing in the hot months.
He began in June and finished in forty days the whole volume of The
Wonder-Book. He also read the tales to his domestic audience as fast as
they were written, and benefited, perhaps, by the expert criticism of
the small people. Many passages in the intercalated chapters, describing
the adventures of Eustace Bright and the Tangle-wood children, are based
on facts well known to his own two youngsters. And when Eustace tells
his hearers that if the dark-haired man dwelling in the cottage yonder
were simply to put some sheets of writing-paper in the fire, all of them
and Tangle-wood itself would turn into cinders and vanish in smoke up
the chimney--even the present chronicler saw the point; though, at
the same time, he somehow could not help believing in the reality of
Primrose, Buttercup, Dandelion, Squash-blossom, and the rest. Thus early
did he begin to grasp the philosophy of the truth of fiction.

The House of the Seven Gables and The Wonder-Book were a fair
eighteen-months' work, and in addition to them Hawthorne had, before
leaving Lenox, planned out the story of The Blithedale Romance; so
that after we got to West Newton--our half-way station on the road to
Concord--he was prepared to sit down and write it. Long before we left
Concord for England he had published Tangle-wood Tales, not to mention
the biography of Franklin Pierce. Una and her brother knew nothing about
the romances; they knew and approved the fairy tales; but their feeling
about all their father's writings was, that he was being wasted in his
study, when he might be with them, and there could be nothing in any
books, whether his own or other authors', that could for a moment bear
comparison with his actual companionship. What he set down upon the page
was but a less free and rich version of the things that came from his
living mouth in our heedless playtimes. "If only papa wouldn't write,
how nice it would be!" And, indeed, a book is but a poor substitute for
the mind and heart of a man, and it exists only as one of the numberless
sorry makeshifts to which time constrains us, while we are waiting for
eternity and full communion.

It was a dreary day in the beginning of the second winter that we set
out on our eastward journey; but Hawthorne's face was brighter than the
weather warranted, for it was turned once more towards the sea. We were
destined, ere we turned back, to go much farther towards the rising
sun than any of us then suspected. We took with us one who had not been
present at our coming--a little auburn-haired baby, born in May. Which
are the happiest years of a man's life? Those in which he is too much
occupied with present felicity to look either forward or backward--to
hope or to remember. There are no such years; but such moments there may
be, and perhaps there were as many such moments awaiting Hawthorne as
had already passed.

His greatest work was done before he left his native land, and within
a year or two of his death he wrote to Richard Stoddard: "I have been a
happy man, and yet I cannot remember any moment of such happy conspiring
circumstances that I would have rung a joy-bell at it."




III


     Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's
     fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle
     Horace--His vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's
     first tears--The heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine--
     The chief incident of the reception--Blithedale and Brook
     Farm--Notes from real life--Rough draughts--Paths of
     composition--The struggle with the Pensioner--Hawthorne's
     method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden walls and a
     roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of
     "The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President"--The most
     homeless people in the world."

The sky that overhung Hawthorne's departure from Lenox was gray with
impending snow, and the flakes had begun to fall ere the vehicle in
which his family was ensconced had reached the railway station in
Pittsfield. Travel had few amenities in those days. The cars were
all plain cars, with nothing to recommend them except that they went
tolerably fast--from twenty to thirty miles an hour. They were chariots
of delight to the children, who were especially happy in occupying the
last car of the train, from the rear windows of which they could look
down upon the tracks, which seemed to slide miraculously away from
beneath them. The conductor collected the tickets--a mysterious rite.
The gradually whitening landscape fled past, becoming ever more level
as we proceeded; by-and-by there was a welcome unpacking of the
luncheon-basket, and all the while there were the endless questions to
be asked and faithfully answered. It was already dark by the time we
were bundled out at the grimy shed which was called the depot, at West
Newton, where we were met by the Horace Manns, and somehow the transit
to the latter's house, which we were to occupy for the winter, was made.
The scene was gloomy and unpleasant; the change from the mountains
of the west depressing; and, for my part, I cannot remember anything
agreeable in this raw little suburb. American life half a century ago
had a great deal of rawness about it, and its external aspect was ugly
beyond present belief. We may be a less virtuous nation now than we were
then, but we are indescribably more good to look at. And the West Newton
of to-day, as compared with that of 1851, will serve for an illustration
of this truth.

Horace Mann's house was a small frame dwelling, painted white, with
green blinds, and furnished with a furnace stiflingly hot. One of
the first things the baby did was to crawl under the sofa in the
sitting-room and lay her small fingers against the radiator or register,
or whatever it is called, through which the heat came. She withdrew them
with a bitter outcry, and on the tip of each was a blister as big as the
tip itself. We had no glorious out-door playground in West Newton; it
was a matter of back yards and sullen streets. The snow kept piling up,
week after week; but there was no opportunity to put it to its proper
use of coasting. The only redeeming feature of the physical situation
that I recall is the momentous fact of a first pair of red-topped boots.
They were very uncomfortable, and always either wet or stiff as iron
from over-dryness; but they made their wearer as happy as they have made
all other boys since boots began. A boy of six with high boots is bigger
than most men.

But if the outward life was on the whole unprepossessing, inward
succulence was not lacking. We had the Manns, to begin with, and the
first real acquaintance between the two sets of children opened here.
Mary Peabody, my mother's elder sister, had married Horace Mann, whose
name is honorably identified with the development in this country of
common-school education. They had three children, of about our age,
all boys. A statue in bronze of Horace Mann stands in front of the
State-house in Boston, and the memory of the strenuous reformer well
merits the distinction. He took things seriously and rather grimly, and
was always emphatically in earnest. He was a friend of George Combe, the
phrenologist, after whom his second boy was named; and he was himself
so ardent a believer in the new science that when his younger son,
Benjamin, was submitted to him for criticism at a very early age he
declared, after a strict phrenological examination, that he was not
worth bringing up. But children's heads sometimes undergo strange
transformations as they grow up, and Benjamin lived to refute abundantly
his father's too hasty conclusion in his case. He became eminent as an
entomologist; George followed the example of his father on educational
lines. Horace, who died comparatively early, was an enthusiastic
naturalist, who received the unstinted praise and confidence of the
great Agassiz. My uncle Horace, as I remember him, was a very tall
man, of somewhat meagre build, a chronic sufferer from headaches and
dyspepsia. His hair was sandy, straight, rather long, and very thick; it
hung down uncompromisingly round his head. His face was a long square,
with a mouth and chin large and immitigably firm. His eyes were
reinforced by a glistening pair of gold-bowed spectacles. He always wore
a long-skirted black coat. His aspect was a little intimidating to small
people; but there were lovely qualities in his nature, his character
was touchingly noble and generous, and the world knows the worth of his
intellect. He was anxious, exacting, and dogmatic, and was not always
able to concede that persons who differed from him in opinion could
be morally normal. This was especially noticeable when the topic of
abolition happened to come up for discussion; Horace Mann was ready
to out-Garrison Garrison; he thought Uncle Tom's Cabin a somewhat
milk-and-water tract. He was convinced that Tophet was the future home
of all slave-holders, and really too good for them, and he practically
worshipped the negro. Had he occupied a seat in Congress at that
juncture, it is likely that the civil war might have been started a
decade sooner than it was. My father and mother were much more moderate
in their view of the situation, and my mother used to say that if
slavery was really so evil and demoralizing a thing as the abolitionists
asserted, it was singular that they should canonize all the subjects of
the institution. But, as a rule, all controversy with the indignant zeal
of our relative was avoided; in his eyes any approach to a philosophical
attitude on the burning question was a crime. Nor were his convictions
less pronounced on the subject of total abstinence from liquor and
tobacco. Now, my father smoked an occasional cigar, and it once came
about that he was led to mention the fact in Horace Mann's hearing. The
reformer's bristles were set in a moment. "Do I understand you to say,
Mr. Hawthorne, that you actually use tobacco?" "Yes, I smoke a cigar
once in a while," replied my father, comfortably. Horace Mann could not
keep his seat; he started up and paced the room menacingly. He had a
high admiration for my father's genius, and a deep affection for him
as a man, and this infidelity to the true faith seemed to him the more
appalling. But he would be true to his colors at all costs, and after
a few moments he planted himself, tall and tragic, before his
interlocutor, and spoke, in a husky voice, to this effect: "Then, Mr.
Hawthorne, it is my duty to tell you that I no longer have the same
respect for you that I have had." Then he turned and strode from the
room, leaving the excommunicated one to his reflections. Faithful are
the wounds of a friend, and my father was as much touched as he was
amused by this example of my uncle's candor. Of course, there was a
great vacuum in the place where my uncle's sense of humor might have
been; but there are a time and place for such men as he, and more than
once the men without sense of humor have moved the world.

In addition to the Manns, there were visitors--the succession of whom,
indeed, was henceforth to continue till the end of my father's earthly
pilgrimage. Among the earliest to arrive was Grace Greenwood, wading
energetically to our door through the December snow. She was one of the
first, if not the first, of the tribe of women correspondents; she had
lately returned, I think, from England, and the volume of her letters
from that strange country was in everybody's hands. She was then a young
woman, large and handsome, with dark hair and complexion, and large,
expressive eyes, harmonious, aquiline features, and a picturesque
appearance. She wore her hair in abundant curls; she exhaled an
atmosphere of romance, of graceful and ardent emotions, and of almost
overpowering sentiment. In fact, she had a genuine gift for expression
and description, and she made an impression in contemporary letters. We
might smile now--and, in truth, we sometimes did then--over some of her
pages; but much of her work would still be called good, if resuscitated
from the dusty book-shelves of the past. I remember one passage in her
English Letters which was often quoted in our family circle as a typical
illustration of the intensity of the period: "The first tears," wrote
Grace, "that I had shed since leaving my dear native land fell fast into
the red heart of an English rose!" Nothing could be better than that;
but the volume was full of similar felicities. You were swimming in
radiant tides of enthusiastic appreciation, quotations from the poets
and poetical rhapsodies; incidents of travel, humorous, pathetic, and
graphic; swirling eddies of word-painting, of moral and ethical and
historical reflection; withal, an immense, amiable, innocent, sprawling
temperament. And as was her book, so was Grace herself; indeed, if any
one could outdo the book in personal conversation, Grace was that happy
individual. What she accomplished when she embarked, full-sailed, upon
the topic of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables may
be pictured to themselves by persons endowed with the rudiments of
imagination; I must not attempt to adorn this sober page with an
attempted reproduction of the scene. Mortal language reeled and cracked
under the strain of giving form to her admiration; but it was so honest
and well meant that it could not but give pleasure even in the midst of
bewilderment. My father bowed his head with a painful smile; but I dare
say it did him good when the ordeal was over.

At this time the reverberations of the European revolutionary year,
1848, were still breaking upon our shores. President Polk had given
mortal offence to Austria by sending over a special commissioner to
determine whether the seceding state of Hungary might be recognized as
a belligerent. In 1850 the Austrian representative, Baron Huelsmann,
had entered upon a correspondence with our own Daniel Webster. The baron
remonstrated, and Daniel mounted upon the national bird and soared in
the patriotic empyrean. The eloquence of the Secretary of State perhaps
aroused unwarranted expectations in the breasts of the struggling
revolutionists, and the Hungarian man of eloquence set out for the
United States to take the occasion by the forelock. Not since the visit
of Lafayette had any foreigner been received here with such testimonials
of public enthusiasm, or listened to by such applausive audiences:
certainly none had ever been sent home again with less wool to show for
so much cry. In 1851, the name of Kossuth was the most popular in the
country, and when it was learned that he had accepted an invitation to
speak in our little West Newton, we felt as if we were almost embarked
upon a campaign--upon an altruistic campaign of emancipation against the
Hapsburg oppressor. The excitement was not confined to persons of mature
age and understanding; it raged among the smaller fry, and every boy
was a champion of Kossuth. The train conveying the hero from New York
to Boston (whence he was to return to West Newton after the reception
there) was timed to pass through our midst at three o 'clock in the
afternoon, and our entire population was at the track-side to see it go
by. After one or two false alarms it came in sight round the curve, the
smokestack of the engine swathed in voluminous folds of Old Glory. The
smoke-stacks of those days were not like our scientific present-day
ones; they were huge, inverted cones, affording ample surface for
decoration. The train did not stop at our station; but Kossuth no doubt
looked out of the window as he flew past and bowed his acknowledgments
of our cheers. He was to return to us the next day, and, meanwhile, the
town-hall, or the church, or whatever building it was that was to be the
scene of his West Newton triumph was put in order for his reception. The
person who writes these words, whose ears had eagerly devoured the story
of the Hungarian revolt, wished to give the august visitor some personal
assurance of his distinguished consideration, and it was finally agreed
by his indulgent parents that he should print upon a card the legend,
"GOD BLESS YOU, KOSSUTH," and be afforded an opportunity personally to
present it to the guest of the nation. Many cards had been used and
cast aside before the scribe, his fingers tremulous with emotion, had
produced something which the Hungarian might be reasonably expected to
find legible. Then, supported by his father and mother, and with his
uncles, aunts, and cousins doubtless not far off, he proceeded proudly
but falteringly to the scene of the presentation. He dimly recalls a
large interior space, profusely decorated with stars and stripes, and
also the colors of Hungary. At the head of the room was a great placard
with "WELCOME, KOSSUTH" inscribed upon it. There was a great throng
and press of men and women, a subdued, omnipresent roar of talk, and a
setting of the tide towards the place where the patriot stood to receive
our personal greetings. The scribe whom I have mentioned, being as
yet brief of stature, was unable to see anything except coat-tails
and petticoats, until of a sudden there was a breaking away of these
obstacles and he found himself in close proximity to a gentleman
of medium height, strongly built, with a mop of dark hair framing a
handsome, pale, smiling face, the lower parts of which were concealed
by a thick brown beard. It was Kossuth, and there was that in his
countenance and expression which satisfied all the dreams of his
admirer. He was chatting and shaking hands with the elder persons; and
in a minute we were moving on again, and the printed card, for which
the whole function had been created, had not been presented. At the
last moment, in an agony of apprehension, the boy pulled at his mother's
skirt and whispered piteously, "But my card!" She heard and remembered;
but need was for haste; we had already passed the vantage-point. She
snatched it from the tightly gripping fingers of the bearer, handed
it to Kossuth, and at the same moment, with a gesture, directed his
attention to her small companion. The Hungarian read the inscription
at a glance, looked me in the eyes with a quick smile of comprehension,
and, stepping towards me, laid his hand upon my head. It was a great
moment for me; but as I went away I suddenly dissolved in tears, whether
from the reaction of emotion, or because I had not myself succeeded in
delivering my gift, I cannot now determine. But Kossuth thereby became,
and for years he continued to be, the most superb figure in my political
horizon.

All this while The Blithedale Romance was being written. Inasmuch as it
was finished on the last day of April, 1852, it could not have occupied
the writer more than five months in the composition. Winter was his best
time for literary work, and there was winter enough that year in West
Newton. In the middle of April came the heaviest snowstorm of the
season. Brook Farm (modified in certain respects to suit the conditions)
was the scene of the story, and Brook Farm was within a fair walk of
West Newton. I visited the place some thirty years later, and found the
general topographical features substantially as described in the book.
In 1852 it was ten years since Hawthorne had lived there, and though he
might have renewed his acquaintance with it while the writing was
going on, there is no record of his having done so; and considering the
unfavorable weather, and the fact that the imaginative atmosphere which
writers seek is enhanced by distance in time, just as the physical
effect of a landscape is improved by distance of space, makes it
improbable that he availed himself of the opportunity. His note-books
contain but few comments upon the routine of life of the community; his
letters to his wife (then Sophia Peabody) are somewhat fuller; one can
trace several of these passages, artistically metamorphosed, in the
romance. The episode of the masquerade picnic is based on fact, and the
scene of the recovery of Zenobia's body from the river is a tolerably
close reproduction of an event in Concord, in which, several years
before, Hawthorne had been an actor.

The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the
hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there
are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the
spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse
of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage
containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for
Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old
surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and a red
nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He
leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent,
addressing nobody but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain
intentness. He is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some
former period of his life, but, falling into decay, he now haunts about
the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered. The word
ragamuffin," he adds, with characteristic determination to be exact,
"does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow
or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety, too, and a kind
of dignity in his groggy and red-nosed destitution." Out of this subtle
correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old
Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy.
But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage,
likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Parker's liquor-bar)
where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because, striking though
it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping with the rest of the
fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit upon such a simile,
would have had conscience and self-denial enough, not to mention fine
enough artistic sense, to delete it!

The craftsman's workmanship may occasionally be traced in this way; but,
as a rule, it is difficult to catch a glimpse of him in his creative
moments. If he made rough draughts of his stories, he must have
destroyed them after the stories themselves were completed; for none
such, in the case of his finished products, was left. I have seen
the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was
destroyed by James T. Fields's printers--Fields having at that time
no notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the value that
would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing. All the extant
manuscripts are singularly free from erasures and interlineations; page
after page is clear as a page of print. He would seem to have taught
himself so thoroughly how to write that, by the time the series of his
longer romances began, he was able to say what he wished to say at a
first attempt. He had the habit, undoubtedly, of planning out the work
of each day on the day previous, generally while walking in solitude
either out-of-doors or, if that were impracticable, up and down the
floor of his study. It was this habit which created the pathway along
the summit of the ridge of the hill at Wayside, in Concord; it was a
deeply trodden path, in the hard, root-inwoven soil, hardly nine inches
wide and about two hundred and fifty yards in length. The monotonous
movement of walking seemed to put his mind in the receptive state
favorable for hearing the voices of imagination. The external faculties
were quiescent, the veil of matter was lifted, and he was able to peruse
the vision beyond.

[MAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS]

But there is an important exception to this rule to be noted in the
matter of his fictitious narratives which were posthumously published.
These, as I have elsewhere said, are all concerned with a single
theme--the never-dying man. There are two complete versions of
Septimius, of about equal length, and many passages in the two are
identical. There is a short sketch on somewhat different lines, called
(by the editor) The Bloody Footstep; and there is still another, and
a much more elaborate attempt to embody the idea in the volume which
I have entitled Doctor Grimshawe's Secret. All these, in short, are
studies of one subject, and they were all unsatisfactory to the author.
The true vein of which he had been in search was finally discovered in
The Dolliver Romance, but the author's death prevented its completion.

In this series of posthumous manuscripts there is a unique opportunity
for making a study of the esoteric qualities of my father's style and
methods, and on a future occasion I hope to present the result of my
investigations in this direction. There is, furthermore, in connection
with them, a mass of material of a yet more interesting and interior
character. While writing the Grimshawe, he was deeply perplexed by
certain details of the plot; the meaning of the Pensioner, and his
proper function in the story, was one of these stumbling-blocks. But
the prosperity of the tale depended directly upon the solution of this
problem. Constantly, therefore, in the midst of the composition, he
would break off and enter upon a wrestling-match with the difficulty.
These wrestling-matches are of an absorbing significance; they reveal to
us the very inmost movements of the author's mind. He tries, and
tries again, to get at the idea that continues to elude him; he forms
innumerable hypotheses; he sets forth on the widest excursions; he gets
out of patience with himself and with his Pensioner, and often damns
the latter in good set terms; but he will not give up the struggle; his
resolve to conquer is adamantine, and the conflict is always renewed.
And there it all stands in black and white; one of the most instructive
chapters in literary criticism in the world--the battle of a great
writer with himself. The final issue, after all, was hardly decisive,
for although a tolerable modus vivendi was reached and a truce declared,
it is evident that Hawthorne regarded the entire scheme of the story as
a mistake, and it is concluded in a perfunctory and indifferent manner.

But it may be doubted whether anything of this sort ever took place
in the making of any of the other stories. These depend but in a
subordinate degree upon what is called technically plot interest. The
author's method was to take a natural, even a familiar incident, and
to transmute it into immortal gold by simply elucidating its inner
spiritual significance. The Scarlet Letter is a mere plain story of love
and jealousy; there is no serious attempt to hide the identity of Roger
Chillingworth or the guilt of the minister. The only surprise in The
House of the Seven Gables consists in the revelation of the fact that
Maule reappears after several generations in the person of his modern
descendant. The structure of The Blithedale Romance appears more
complicated; but that is mainly because, in a masterly manner, the
author keeps the structural lines out of sight and concentrates
attention upon the interplay of character. The scaffolding upon which
are hung the splendid draperies of The Marble Faun is, again, of the
simplest formation, though the nature of the materials is unfamiliar.

This is a digression; the present volume, as I have already stated,
is not designed to include--except incidentally-anything in the way of
literary criticism.

Blithedale having been finished and published, the question of where to
settle down permanently once more came up for an answer. Of course, our
sojourn at Mr. Mann's house had been a temporary expedient only; and for
that matter, the Manns, following the example of most Americans before
and since, had rented the place merely as a stepping-stone to something
else. My father's eyes again turned with longing towards the sea-shore;
but the fitting nook for him there still failed to offer itself. People
are naturally disposed to return to places in which they have formerly
lived, and Concord could not but suggest itself to one who had passed
some of the happiest years of his life among its serene pastures and
piney forests. This suggestion, moreover, was supplemented by the
urgent invitations of his old friends there, and Mr. Emerson, who was a
practical man as well as a philosopher, substantiated his arguments by
throwing into the scale a concrete dwelling. It was an edifice which
not even the most imaginative and optimistic of house-agents would have
found it easy to picture as a sumptuous country-seat; it was just four
wooden walls and a roof, and they had been standing for a hundred years
at least. The occupants of this house had seen the British march past
from Boston on the 19th of April, 1775, and a few hours later they had
seen them return along the same dusty highway at a greatly accelerated
pace and under annoying circumstances. There was a legend that a man had
once lived there who had announced that death was not an indispensable
detail of life, and that he for his part intended never to die; but
after many years he had grown weary of the monotony of his success, or
had realized that it would take too long a time to prove himself in
the right, and rather than see the thing through he allowed himself to
depart. The old structure, in its original state, consisted of a big,
brick chimney surrounded by four rooms and an attic, with a kitchen
tacked on at the rear. It stood almost flush with the side-path along
the highway; behind it rose a steep hill-side to a height of about one
hundred feet; in front, on the other side of the road, stretched broad
meadows with a brook flowing through the midst of them. Such conditions
would not seem altogether to favor a man wedded to seclusion.

But the thing was not at this juncture quite so bad as it had been. Mr.
Alcott, whose unselfish devotion to the welfare of the human race made
it incumbent upon his friends to supply him with the means of earthly
subsistence, had been recently domiciled in the house by Mr. Emerson
(how the latter came into possession of it I have forgotten, if ever
I knew), and he had at once proceeded to wreak upon it his unique
architectural talent. At any rate, either he himself or somebody in his
behalf had set up a small gable in the midst of the front, thrown out a
double bow-window, and added a room on the west side. This interrupted
the deadly, four-square uniformity, and suggested further improvements.
Mr. Alcott certainly built the summer-house on the hill-side, and
terraced the hill, which was also planted with apple-trees. Another
summer-house arose in the meadow opposite, which went with the property,
and rustic fences separated the domain from the road. The dwelling was
now fully as commodious as the red house at Lenox, though it had no
Monument Mountain and Stockbridge Bowl to look out upon.

[IMAGE: THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife)]

The estate, comprising, I think, forty-two acres, all told, including
upward of twenty acres of second-growth woodland above the hill,
perfectly useless except for kindling-wood and for the sea-music which
the pine-trees made, was offered to my father at a reasonable enough
figure, to be his own and his heirs' forever. He came over and looked
at the place, thought "The Wayside" would be a good name for it, and
was perhaps helped to decide upon taking it by the felicity of this
appellation. It was close upon the highway, undeniably; but then the
highway was so little travelled that it might almost as well not have
been there. One might, also, plant a high hedge in place of the fence
and make shift to hide behind it. One could enlarge the house as need
demanded; an affluent vegetable garden could be laid out in the meadow,
and fruit and ornamental trees could be added to the slopes of the
hill-side. The village was removed to a distance of a trifle over a
mile, so that the roar of its traffic would not invade this retreat; and
Mr. Emerson sat radiating peace and wisdom between the village and
"The Wayside"; while Mr. Alcott shone with ancillary lustre only a
stone's-throw away. Thoreau and Ellery Channing were tramping about
in the neighborhood, and Judge Hoar and his beautiful sister dispensed
sweetness and light in the village itself. Walden Pond, still secluded
as when only the Indians had seen the sky and the trees reflected in
it, was within a two-mile walk, and the silent Musketaquid stole on its
level way beyond the hill on the other side. Surely, a man might travel
far and not find a spot better suited for work and meditation and
discreet society than Concord was.

But, of course, the necessity of settling down somewhere was a main
consideration. Concord, was inviting in itself, but it was also
recommended by the argument of exclusion; no other place so desirable
and at the same time so easy of attainment happened to present itself.
It did not lie within sound and sight of the ocean; but that was the
worst that could be urged against it. A man must choose, and Concord
was, finally, Hawthorne's choice.

At this epoch he had not contemplated, save in day-dreams, the
possibility of visiting the Old World. His friend, Franklin Pierce, had
just become President-elect, but that fact had not suggested to his mind
the change in his own fortunes which it was destined to bring about.
He was too modest a critic of his own abilities to think that his work
would ever bring him money enough for foreign travel, and, therefore,
in accepting Concord as his home, he believed that he was fixing the
boundaries of his future earthly experience. It was not his ideal;
no imaginative man can ever hope to find that; but as soon as we have
called a place our Home, it acquires a charm that has nothing to do with
material conditions. The best-known song in American poesy has impressed
that truth upon Americans--who are the most homeless people in the
world.




IV


     A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His
     incorrigible modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common
     men feel more like Emerson than he did--His personal
     appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance like the reveille
     of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are in the
     woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus
     individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--
     Sounds of distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape-
     culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A
     country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An unwritten
     romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's
     tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer
     than in the world--The return of the pilgrim.

My father's first look at "The Wayside" had been while snow was still
on the ground, and he had reported to his wife that it resembled a
cattle-pen.

But the family advent was effected in June, and although a heavy rain
had fallen while the domestic impedimenta were in transit, wetting the
mattresses and other exposed furniture, yet when the summer sun came out
things began to mend. My mother and Una came a day ahead of the others,
and with the help of carpenters and upholsterers, and a neighboring
Irishman and his wife for cleaning and moving purposes, they soon got
human order into the place of savage chaos. The new carpet was down in
the study, the walls had been already papered and the wood-work grained,
the pictures were hung in their places, and the books placed on their
shelves. By the time the father, the boy, the baby, and the nurse drove
up in the hot afternoon a home had been created for their reception.

Mr. Emerson was, and he always remained, the hub round which the wheel
of Concord's fortunes slowly and contentedly revolved. He was at
this time between forty-five and fifty years old, in the prime of
his beneficent powers. He had fulfilled the promise of his unique
youth--obeyed the voice at eve, obeyed at prime. The sweet austerity of
his nature had been mellowed by human sorrows--the loss of his brothers
and of his eldest son; he had the breadth and poise that are given by
knowledge of foreign lands, and friendships with the best men in them;
he had the unstained and indomitable independence of a man who has
always avowed his belief, and never failed to be true to each occasion
for truth; he had the tranquillity of faith and insight, and he was
alert with that immortal curiosity for noble knowledge the fruit of
which enriches his writings. Upon his modestly deprecating brows was
already set the wreath of a world-wide fame, and yet every village
farmer and store-keeper, and every child, found in his conversation the
wisdom and companionship suited to his needs, and was made to feel
that his own companionship was a valued gift. Emerson becomes more
extraordinary the further we get away from him in years; illustrating
the truth which Landor puts into the mouth of Barrow in one of his
Imaginary Conversations, that "No very great man ever reached the
standard of his greatness in the crowd of his contemporaries: this hath
always been reserved for the secondary." The wealth contained in his
essays has only begun to be put in general circulation, and the harvest
of his poetry is still more remote; while the sincere humility of the
man himself, who was the best incarnate example of many of his ideals,
still puzzles those critics who believe every one must needs be inferior
to his professions.

"Though I am fond of writing and of public speaking," said Emerson, "I
am a very poor talker, and for the most part prefer silence"; and he
went on to compare himself in this respect with Alcott, "the prince of
conversers." Alcott was undoubtedly the prince of fluency, and
Emerson rarely, in private dialogue, ventured to string together many
consecutive sentences; but the things he did say, on small occasion or
great, always hit the gold. On being appealed to, or when his turn came,
he would hang a moment in the wind, and then pay off before the
breeze of thought with an accuracy and force that gave delight with
enlightenment. The form was often epigrammatic, but the air with which
it was said beautifully disclaimed any epigrammatic consciousness or
intention. It was, rather, "I am little qualified to speak adequately,
but this, at least, does seem to me to be true." In the end, therefore,
as the interlocutor thought it all over, he was perhaps surprised to
discover that, little in quantity as Emerson may have said during the
talk, he had yet said more than any one else in substance. But it may be
admitted that he was even better in listening than in speech; his
look, averted but attentive, with a smile which seemed to postpone full
development to the moment when his companion should have uttered the
expected apple of gold in the picture of silver, was subtly stimulating
to the latter's intellect, and prompted him to outdo himself. His
questions were often revelations, discovering truth which the other
only then perceived, and thus beguiling him into admiration of his own
supposed intelligence. In this, as in other things, he acted upon the
precept that it is more blessed to give than to receive gratification;
he never seemed to need any other happiness than that of imparting it.
And so selflessly and insensibly were the riches of his mind and nature
communicated to the community that innocent little Concord could not
quite help believing that its wealth and renown were somehow a creation
of its own. The loafers in Walcott & Holden's grocery store were, in
their own estimation, of heroic stature, because of the unegoistic
citizen who dwelt over yonder among the pines. Emerson was a great man,
no doubt; but then he was no more than their own confessed equal, or
inferior!

This will and power to secularize himself is perhaps Emerson's unique
attribute. It is comparatively easy to stand on mountain-tops and to
ride Pegasus; but how many of those competent to such feats could at the
same time sit cheek by jowl with hucksters and teamsters without a trace
of condescension, and while rubbing shoulders with the rabble of the
street in town-meeting, speak without arrogance the illuminating and
deciding word? This, at last, is the true democracy that levels up
instead of down. An Emerson who can make common men feel more like
Emerson than he himself did is the kind of man we need to bring America
up to her ideals.

Emerson was ungainly in build, with narrow, sloping shoulders, large
feet and hands, and a projecting carriage of the head, which enhanced
the eagle-like expression of his glance and features. His head was
small; it was covered (in 1852) with light brown hair, fine and
straight; he was cleanshaven save for a short whisker; the peaked ends
of an uncomfortable collar appeared above the folds of a high, black
silk stock. His long-skirted black coat was commonly buttoned up; he
wore, on different occasions, a soft felt hat or a high silk one, the
latter, from use, having become in a manner humanized. On the street he
kept his face up as he walked along, and perceived the approach of an
acquaintance afar off, and the wise, slow smile gleamed about his mouth
as he drew near. "How do you do?" was sometimes his greeting; but more
often, "Good-bye!" or "Good-night!"--an original and more sensible
greeting. Though ungainly in formation, he was not ungraceful in bearing
and action; there was a fitness and harmony in his manifestations
even on the physical plan. On the lecture platform he stood erect and
unadorned, his hands hanging folded in front, save when he changed the
leaf of his manuscript, or emphasized his words with a gesture: his
customary one, simple but effective, was to clinch his right fist,
knuckles upward, the arm bent at the elbow, then a downward blow of the
forearm, full of power bridled. It was accompanied by such a glance
of the eyes as no one ever saw except from Emerson: a glance like the
reveille of a trumpet. Yet his eyes were not noticeably large, and their
color was greenish-gray; but they were well set and outlined in his
head, and, more than is the case with most men, they were the windows
of his soul. Wendell Phillips had an eloquent and intrepid eye, but it
possessed nothing approaching the eloquence and spiritual influence of
Emerson's. In every Lyceum course in Concord, Emerson lectured once or
twice, and the hall was always filled. One night he had the misfortune
to wear a pair of abominably creaking boots; every slightest change of
posture would be followed by an outcry from the sole-leather, and
the audience soon became nervously preoccupied in expecting them. The
sublimest thoughts were mingled with these base material accompaniments.
But there was nothing to be done, unless the lecturer would finish his
lecture in his stocking-feet, and we were fain to derive a fortuitous
inspiration from observing the unfaltering meekness with which our
philosopher accepted the predicament. I have forgotten the subject of
the lecture on that occasion, but the voice of the boots will always
sound in my memory.

In his own house Emerson shone with essential hospitality, and yet he
wonderfully effaced himself; any one but he might hold the centre of
the stage. You felt him everywhere, but if you would see him, you must
search the wings. He sat in his chair, bending forward, one leg crossed
over the other, his elbows often supported on his knee; his legs were
rather long and slender, and he had a way, after crossing his leg, of
hitching the instep of that foot under the calf of the other leg, so
that he seemed braided up. He seldom stood in a room, or paced to and
fro, as my father was fond of doing. But the two men were almost equally
addicted to outdoor walking, and both preferred to walk alone. Emerson
formed the habit of betaking himself to Walden woods, which extended to
within a mile or so of his door; thence would he return with an exalted
look, saying, "The muses are in the woods to-day"; and no one who has
read his Woodnotes can doubt that he found them there. Occasionally
Channing, Thoreau, or my father would be his companion; Alcott preferred
to busy himself about his rustic fences and summer-houses, or to sit
the centre of a circle and converse, as he called it; meaning to
soliloquize, looking round from face to face with unalterable faith and
complacency.

My father read Emerson with enjoyment; though more and more, as he
advanced in life, he was disposed to question the expediency of stating
truth in a disembodied form; he preferred it incarnate, as it appears in
life and in story. But he could not talk to Emerson; his pleasure in his
society did not express itself in that form. Emerson, on the other hand,
assiduously cultivated my father's company, and, contrary to his general
habit, talked to him continuously; but he could not read his romances;
he admitted that he had never been able to finish one of them. He loved
to observe him; to watch his silence, which was full of a kind of speech
which he was able to appreciate; "Hawthorne rides well his horse of the
night!" My father was Gothic; Emerson was Roman and Greek. But each was
profoundly original and independent. My father was the shyer and more
solitary of the two, and yet persons in need of human sympathy were able
to reach a more interior region in him than they could in Emerson. For
the latter's thought was concerned with types and classes, while the
former had the individual touch. He distrusted rules, but had faith
in exceptions and idiosyncrasies. Emerson was nobly and magnanimously
public; my father, exquisitely and inevitably private; together they met
the needs of nearly all that is worthy in human nature.

Emerson rose upon us frequently during our early struggles with our
new abode, like a milder sun; the children of the two families became
acquainted, the surviving son, Edward, two years my elder, falling to
my share. But Emerson himself also became my companion, with a humanity
which to-day fills me with grateful wonder. I remember once being taken
by him on a long walk through the sacred pine woods, and on another
occasion he laid aside the poem or the essay he was writing to entertain
Una in his study, whither she had gone alone and of her own initiative
to make him a call! It is easy to compliment a friend upon his children,
but how many of us will allow themselves to be caught and utilized by
them in this fashion? But Emerson's mind was so catholic, so humble, and
so deep that I doubt not he derived benefit even from child-prattle. His
wife rivalled him in hospitality, though her frail health disabled her
from entering into the physical part of social functions with the same
fortitude; in these first months we were invited to a party where we
were fellow-guests with all the other children of Concord. There they
were, their mothers with them, and everything in sight that a child at
a party could require. My new friend Edward mounted me on his pony, and
his father was at hand to catch me when I fell off. Such things sound
incredible, but they are true. A great man is great at all times, and
all over.

Thoreau, Channing, and Alcott were also visible to us at this time, but
of none of them do I find any trace in my memory; though I know, as
a matter of fact, that Channing and my father once permitted me to
accompany them on a walk round the country roads, which inadvertently
prolonged itself to ten miles, and I knew what it was to feel
foot-weary. But another neighbor of ours, hardly less known to fame,
though in a widely different line of usefulness, makes a very distinct
picture in my mind; this was Ephraim Wales Bull, the inventor of the
Concord grape. He was as eccentric as his name; but he was a genuine
and substantive man, and my father took a great liking to him, which was
reciprocated. He was short and powerful, with long arms, and a big head
covered with bushy hair and a jungle beard, from which looked out a pair
of eyes singularly brilliant and penetrating. He had brains to think
with, as well as strong and skilful hands to work with; he personally
did three-fourths of the labor on his vineyard, and every grape-vine had
his separate care. He was married and had three children, amiable
but less interesting than himself. He had, also, a tremendous temper,
evidenced by his heavy and high-arched eyebrows, and once in a while he
let slip upon his helpers in the vineyard this formidable wrath, which
could easily be heard in our peaceful precincts, like sounds of distant
battle. He often came over and sat with my father in the summer-house on
the hill, and there talked about politics, sociology (though under some
other name, probably), morals, and human nature, with an occasional
lecture on grape-culture. He permitted my sister and me to climb the
fence and eat all the grapes we could hold; it seems to me he could
hardly have realized our capacity. During our second summer he built a
most elaborate fence along the road-front of his estate; it must have
been three hundred yards long and it was as high as a man could reach;
the palings, instead of being upright, were criss-crossed over one
another, leaving small diamond-shaped interstices. The whole was painted
brilliant white, to match the liliputian cottage in which the Bull
family contrived (I know not how) to ensconce itself. When the fence was
built, Mr. Bull would every day come forth and pace slowly up and down
the road, contemplating it with the pride of a parent; indeed, it was no
puny achievement, and when I revisited Concord, thirty years later,
the great white fence was still there, with a few gaps in it, but still
effective. But the builder, and the grapes--where were they? Where are
Cheops, and the hanging gardens of Babylon?

Among many visitors came Richard Henry Stoddard, already a poet, but
anxious to supplement the income from his verses by a regular stipend
from the big pocket of Uncle Sam. His first coming was in summer, and
he and my father went up on the hill and sat in the summer-house there,
looking out upon the wide prospect of green meadows and distant woods,
but probably seeing nothing of them, their attention being withdrawn to
scenes yet fairer in the land of imagination and memory. Stoddard was
then, as always, a handsome man, strong and stanch, black-haired and
black-bearded, with strong eyes that could look both fierce and tender.
He was masculine, sensitive, frank, and humorous; his chuckle had
infinite merriment in it; but, as his mood shifted, there might be
tears in his eyes the next moment. He was at that time little more
than five-and-twenty years old, and he looked hardly that; he was a New
England country youth of genius. Nature had kindled a fire in him which
has never gone out. Like my father, he was affiliated with the sea, and
had its freshness and daring, though combined with great modesty, and he
felt honored by the affection with which he inspired the author of The
Scarlet Letter. It was not until his second visit, in the winter,
that the subject of a custom-house appointment for him came up; for my
father, being known as a close friend of the President, whose biography
he had written for the campaign, became the object of pilgrimages other
than literary ones. He received sound advice, and introductions, which
aided him in getting the appointment, and he held it for nearly twenty
years--more to the benefit of the custom-house than of poetry, no
doubt, though he never let poetry escape him, and he is to-day a mine
of knowledge and wisdom on literary subjects. There is an immense human
ardor, power, and pathos in Stoddard; better than any other American
poet does he realize the conception of his great English brother--the
love of love, the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn. The world has proved
impotent to corrupt his heroic simplicity; he loved fame much, but truth
more. He is a boy in his heart still, and he has sung songs which touch
whatever is sweetest, tenderest, and manliest in the soul of man.

[IMAGE: EDWIN P. WHIFFLE]

E. P. Whipple, essentially a man of letters, and famous in his day as a
critic of literature, appeared often in "The Wayside." His verdict on a
book carried weight; it was an era when literary criticism was regarded
seriously, and volumes devoted to critical studies had something more
than, a perfunctory vogue. He had written penetrating and cordial things
about my father's books, and foretold the high place which he would
ultimately occupy in our Pantheon. He was rich in the kind of Attic salt
which, was characteristic of Boston in the middle century; the product
of an almost excessive culture erected on sound, native brains. He had
abounding wit; not only wit of the sort that begets mirth, but that
larger and graver wit which Macaulay notices in Bacon's writings--a
pure, irradiating, intellectual light. It had often the effect of an
actual physical illumination cast upon the topic. He was magnificent as
a dinner-table companion. He was rather a short, thick-shouldered man,
with a big head on a short neck, a broad, projecting forehead, prominent
eyes, defended by shiny spectacles, and bushy whiskers. He is not
remembered now, probably because he never produced any organic work
commensurate with his huge talent. Analyses of the work of others,
however just, useful, and creative, do not endure unless they are
associated with writing of the independent sort. Whipple, with all his
ability and insight, never entered the imaginative field on his own
account, and in the press of wits he falls behind and is forgotten.

My father had come to Concord with the idea of a new romance in his
mind; he designed it to be of a character more cheerful than the
foregoing ones. It was never written, and but the slightest traces of
what it might have been are extant. Herman Melville had spent a day
with us at Concord, and he had suggested a story to Hawthorne; but the
latter, after turning it over in his mind, came to the conclusion that
Melville could treat the subject better than he could; but Melville
finally relinquished it also. It seems likely, however, that this
projected tale was not the one which Hawthorne had originally been
meditating. At all events, it was postponed in favor of a new book of
wonder-stories from Greek mythology--the first one having had immediate
popularity, and by the time this was finished, the occasion had arrived
which led to the writing of Pierce's biography. This, in turn, was
followed by the offer by the President to his friend of the Liverpool
consulate, then the most lucrative appointment in the gift of the
administration; and Hawthorne's acceptance of it caused all literary
projects to be indefinitely abandoned.

But even had there been time for the writing of another book, the death
of Hawthorne's sister Louisa would doubtless have unfitted him for a
while from undertaking it. This was the most painful episode connected
with his life; Louisa was a passenger on a Hudson River steamboat which
was burned. She was a gentle, rather fragile woman, with a playful humor
and a lovable nature; she had not the intellectual force either of her
brother or of her sister Elizabeth; but her social inclinations were
stronger than theirs. She was a delightful person to have in the house,
and her nephew and niece were ardently in love with her. She was on her
way to "The Wayside" when the calamity occurred, and we were actually
expecting her on the day she perished. Standing on the blazing deck,
with the panic and the death-scenes around her, the gentle woman had to
make the terrible choice between the river and the fire. She was alone;
there was none to advise or help her or be her companion in inevitable
death. Her thoughts must have gone to her brother, with his strength and
courage, his skill as a swimmer; but he was far away, unconscious of her
desperate extremity. She had to choose, and the river was her choice.
With that tragic conception of the drowning of Zenobia fresh in his
mind, the realization of his sister's fate must have gained additional
poignancy in my father's imagination. He was hard hit, and the traces of
the blow were manifest on him. After about a month, he made a journey to
the Isles of Shoals with Franklin Pierce, and in that breezy outpost
of the land he spent some weeks, much to his advantage. This was in the
autumn of 1852, and I recall well enough the gap in things which his
long absence made for me, and my perfect joy when the whistle of the
train at the distant railway station signalled his return. Twenty
minutes had to elapse before the railroad carriage could bring him
to our door; they were long and they were brief, after the manner
of minutes in such circumstances. He came, and there was a moment of
indescribable glory while he leaped from the carriage and faced the
situation on the doorstep of his home. His countenance was glowing with
health and the happiness of home-coming. I thought him, as I always did,
the most beautiful of human beings, by which I do not mean beautiful
in feature, for of that I was not competent to hold an opinion; but
beautiful in the feelings which he aroused in me beholding him. He was
beautiful to be with, to hear, touch, and experience. Such is the effect
of the spiritual sphere of good men, in whom nature and character
are harmonious. My father got his appointment from Washington in the
following March, 1853. His wife had but one solicitude in leaving
America; her mother was aged and in delicate health, and their parting
might be forever in this world. But a month before the appointment was
confirmed, her mother quietly and painlessly died. It was as if she had
wished not to be separated from her beloved daughter, and had entered
into the spiritual state in the expectation of being nearer to her there
than she could be in the world. My mother always affirmed that she
was conscious of her mother's presence with her on momentous occasions
during the remainder of her own life.

June came; the farewells were said, we were railroaded to Boston,
embarked on the Cunard steamship Niagara, Captain Leitch, and steamed
out of Boston Harbor on a day of cloudlessness and calm. Incoming
vessels, drifting in the smoothness, saluted us with their flags, and
the idle seamen stared at us, leaning over their bulwarks. The last
of the low headlands grew dim and vanished in the golden haze of the
afternoon. "Go away, tiresome old land!" sang out my sister and myself;
but my father, standing beside us, gazing westward with a serious look,
bade us be silent. Two hundred and twenty years had passed since our
first ancestor had sought freedom on those disappearing shores, and our
father was the first of his descendants to visit the Old Home whence he
came. What was to be the outcome? But the children only felt that the
ocean was pleasant and strange, and they longed to explore it. The
future and the past did not concern them.




V


     A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the
     carpenter--W. D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An
     aristocratic acrobat--Speech that beggars eulogy--The boots
     of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The last
     infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the
     spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The
     coquetry of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The
     thirsty island--Gloomy English comforts--Systematic
     geniality--A standing puzzle--The respirator--Scamps, fools,
     mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of sailor-men--"Is
     this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm of
     insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle
     against dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-,
     Irish-, and Scotchman--An Englishman owns his country--A
     contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable gateway--Years of
     memorable trifles.

The steamship Niagara was, in 1853, a favorable specimen of nautical
architecture; the Cunard Company had then been in existence rather less
than a score of years, and had already established its reputation for
safety and convenience. But, with the exception of the red smoke-stack
with the black ring round the top, there was little similarity between
the boat that took us to England and the mammoths that do that service
for travellers now adays. The Niagara was about two hundred and fifty
feet long, and was propelled by paddle-wheels, upon the summits of
whose curving altitudes we were permitted to climb in calm weather.
The interior decorations were neat and pretty, but had nothing of the
palatial and aesthetic gorgeousness which educates us in these later
ages. The company of passengers was so small that a single cow, housed
in a pen on deck, sufficed for their needs in the way of milk, and there
were still left alive and pecking contentedly about their coop a number
of fowls, after we had eaten all we could of their brethren at the ten
dinners that were served during the voyage. The crew, from the captain
down, were all able seamen, friendly and companionable, and not so
numerous but that it was easy to make their individual acquaintance. The
most engaging friend of the small people was the carpenter, who had his
shop on deck, and from whom I acquired that passion for the profession
which every normal boy ought to have, and from the practice of which I
derived deep enjoyment and many bloody thumbs and fingers for ten years
afterwards.

But we had companionship historically at least more edifying. William
D. Ticknor, the senior partner of my father's publishers, was the only
figure familiar at the outset. He was one of the most amiable of men,
with thick whiskers all round his face and spectacles shining over
his kindly eyes; a sturdy, thick-set personage, active in movement and
genial in conversation. It was James T. Fields who usually made the
trips to England; but on this occasion Fields got no farther than
the wharf, where the last object visible was his comely and smiling
countenance as he waved his adieux. Conspicuous among the group on the
after-deck, as we glided out of the smooth harbor of Boston, was an
urbane and dignified gentleman of perhaps sixty years of age, with a
clean-shaven mouth and chin, finely moulded, and with what Tennyson
would call an educated whisker, short and gray, defining the region
in front of and below his ears. He spoke deliberately, and in language
carefully and yet easily chosen, with intonations singularly distinct
and agreeable, giving its full value to every word. This was our first
native Englishman; no less a personage than Mr. Crampton, in fact, the
British Minister, who was on his way to Halifax. He had fine, calm,
quietly observant eyes, which were pleasantly employed in contemplating
the beauty of that summer seascape--an opalescent ocean, and islands
slumbering in the July haze. Near him stood a light-built, tall,
athletic individual, also obviously English, but thirty years younger;
full, also, of artistic appreciation; this was Field Talfourd, who was
an artist, and many things besides; a man proficient in all forms
of culture. His features were high and refined, and, without being
handsome, irresistibly attractive. He turned out to be a delightful
playmate for the children, and astonished them and the rest of the
company by surprising gymnastic feats in the rigging. The speech of
these two Britishers gave the untravelled American a new appreciation of
the beauty and significance of the English language. Not all Englishmen
speak good English, but when they do, they beggar eulogy.

[IMAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR]

George Silsbee was likewise of our party; he was an American of the
Brahman type, a child of Cambridge and Boston, a man of means, and an
indefatigable traveller. He had the delicate health and physique of the
American student of those days, when out-door life and games made no
part of our scholastic curricula. He may have been forty years old,
slight and frail, with a thin, clean-shaven face and pallid complexion,
but full of mind and sensibility. We do not heed travellers now, and I
am inclined to think they are less worth heeding than they used to be.
It is so easy to see the world in these latter days that few persons see
it to any purpose even when they go through the motions of doing so. But
to hear George Bradford or Silsbee talk of England, France, and Italy,
in the fifties, was a liberal education, and I used sometimes to stare
fascinated at the boots of these wayfarers, admiring them for the
wondrous places in which they had trodden. Silsbee travelled with his
artistic and historic consciousness all on board, and had so much to say
that he never was able to say it all.

But to my father himself were accorded the honors of the captain's
table, and for him were fired the salutes of cannon which thundered us
out of Boston Harbor and into Halifax. These compliments, however, were
paid to him not as a man of letters, but as a political representative
of his country, and, let a man be as renowned as he will on his personal
account, he will still find it convenient, in order to secure smooth and
agreeable conditions on his way through the world, to supplement that
distinction with recommendations from the State Department. Respect for
rank is the last infirmity even of noble republican minds, and it oils
the wheels of the progress of those who possess it. An American widow
of my later acquaintance, a lady of two marriageable daughters and small
social pretensions in her own country, toured Europe with success
and distinction, getting all the best accommodations and profoundest
obeisances by the simple device of placing the word "Lady" before her
modest signature in the hotel registers. She was a lady, of course, and
had a right so to style herself, and if snobbish persons chose to read
into the word more than it literally meant, that was not Mrs. Green's
affair.

American commerce still existed in 1853, and the Liverpool consulate was
supposed to have more money in it than any other office in the gift
of the administration. As a matter of fact, several of my father's
predecessors had retired from their tenure of office with something
handsome (pecuniarily speaking) to their credit; whether the means by
which it had been acquired were as handsome is another question. Be
that as it may, Congress, soon after my father's accession, passed a
law cutting down the profits about three-fourths, and he was obliged to
practise the strictest economy during his residence abroad in order to
come home with a few thousand dollars in his pocket. Nevertheless, the
dignity, in the official sense, of this consular post was considerable,
and it brought him, in combination with his literary fame, a good deal
more attention in England than he well knew what to do with. But, in one
way or another, he also made friends there who remained to the end among
the dearest of his life and more than countervailed all the time and
energy wasted on the Philistines.

The Atlantic, all the way across, with the exception of one brief
emotional disturbance between lunch and dinner-time, wore a smile of
fatuous serenity. The sun shone; the vast pond-surface oilily undulated,
or lay in absolute flatness, or at most defiled under our eyes in
endless squadrons of low-riding crests. My mother, whose last experience
of sea-ways had been the voyage to Cuba, in which the ship was all but
lost in a series of hurricanes, was captivated by this soft behavior,
and enjoyed the whole of it as much, almost, as her husband, who
expanded and drank in delight like a plant in the rain. But, in truth,
these must have been blessed hours for them both. Behind them lay nearly
eleven years of married life, spent in narrow outward circumstances,
lightened only towards the last by the promise of some relaxation from
strain, during which they had found their happiness in each other, and
in the wise and tender care of their children, and in the converse of
chosen friends. They had filled their minds with knowledge concerning
the beauties and interests of foreign lands, with but a slender
expectation of ever beholding them with bodily sight, but none the less
well prepared to understand and appreciate them should the opportunity
arrive. And now, suddenly, it had arrived, and they were on the way to
the regions of their dreams, with the prospect of comparative affluence
added. They had nearly twelve years of earthly sojourn together before
them, the afternoon sunshine to be clouded a little near the close by
the husband's failing health, but glorified more and more by mutual
love, and enriched with memories of all that had before been unfulfilled
imaginings. This voyage eastward was the space of contemplation between
the two periods, and the balm of its tranquillity well symbolized the
peace of soul and mind with which they awaited what the horizons were to
disclose.

The right way to approach England for the first time is not by the
west coast, but by the south, as Julius Caesar did, beckoned on by the
ghostly, pallid cliffs that seem to lift themselves like battlements
against the invader. It is historically open to question whether there
would have been any Roman occupation, or any Saxon or Norman one
either, for that matter, but for the coquetry of those chalk cliffs.
An adventurer, sighting the low and marshy shores of Lancashire, and
muddying his prows in the yellow waters of the Mersey, would be apt
to think that such a land were a good place to avoid. But the race of
adventurers has long since died out, and their place is occupied by the
wide-flying cormorants of commerce, to whom mud flats and rock deserts
present elysian beauties, provided only there be profit in them.
One kind of imagination has been superseded by another, and both are
necessary to the full exploitation of this remarkable globe that we
inhabit.

But even the level capes of Lancashire were alluring to eyes that saw
England, our venerable mother, loom behind them, with her thousand
years' pageantry of warfare and civilization. The egregious little
island is a thirsty place; the land drinks rain as assiduously as do its
inhabitants beer and other liquors. Heavy mists and clouds enveloped it
as we drew near, and ushered us up the Mersey into a brown omnipresence
of rain. The broad, clear sunshine of the Atlantic was left behind, and
we stood on wet decks and were transported to sloppy wharfs by means
of a rain-sodden and abominably smoking little tug-boat--as the way
was fifty years ago. Liverpool was a gray-stone labyrinth open to the
deluge, and its inhabitants went to and fro with umbrellas over their
heads and black respirators over their mouths, looking as if such were
their normal plight--as, indeed, it was. Much of this was not needed to
quench the enthusiasm of the children. The Waterloo Hotel, to which, by
advice of friends, we were driven, seemed by its very name to carry out
the idea of saturation, which the activities of nature so insistently
conveyed. It was intensely discomfortable, and though the inside of the
hotel was well supplied with gloomy English comforts, and the solemn
meals were administered with a ceremonious gravity that suggested their
being preliminaries to funerals, yet it was hard to be light-hearted.
The open-grate coal fires were the most welcome feature of this summer
season, and no doubt the wine list offered the best available substitute
for sunlight; but we had not been trained to avail ourselves of it.
We drank water, which certainly appeared an idle proceeding in such a
climate. In Liverpool, however, or in its suburbs, we were to live for
the better part of four years, and we must make the best of it. And
there is in English people, when rightly approached, a steady and
systematic geniality that not only makes handsome amends for their
weather, but also accounts for the otherwise singular fact that the
country is inhabited at all. A people with a smaller fund of interior
warmth could not have endured it. The French talk about conquering
England, but they could not hold it if they did, and it is one of the
standing puzzles of history how the Romans, an Italian race, were able
to maintain themselves under these skies during four centuries. It may
be objected that the present English population is not indigenous to the
island; but they are the survival of the fittest and toughest selected
from many aspirants. Nor can it be doubted that the British hunger for
empire in all parts of the world is due to nothing so much as to their
anxiety to have a plausible pretext for living elsewhere than at home.

My father took the rain, as he took everything that could not be helped,
philosophically, and it seemed to do him no harm; indeed, his health
was uniformly good all through his English residence. It did not suit so
well my mother, who was constitutionally delicate in the lungs; she was
soon obliged to adopt the English respirator, and finally was driven
to take refuge for the greater part of a year in Lisbon and Madeira,
returning only a little before the departure of the family for Italy in
1858. But there must have been in him an ancestral power of resistance
still effective after more than two centuries of transplantation; he
grew ruddy and robust while facing the mist and mirk, and inhaling the
smoky moisture that did service for air. Nor was his health impaired by
the long hours in the daily consulate--a grimy little room barely five
paces from end to end, with its dusty windows so hemmed in by taller
buildings that even had there been any sunshine to make the attempt, it
could never have succeeded in effecting an entrance through them. Here,
from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, he dealt with all
varieties of scamps and mendicants, fools and desperadoes, and all the
tribe of piratical cutthroats which in those days constituted a large
part of the merchant marine. Calamity, imbecility, and rascality were
his constant companions in that dingy little den; and the gloomy and
sooty skies without but faintly pictured the moral atmosphere which
they exhaled; he entered deeply into all their affairs, projects, and
complaints, feeling their troubles, probably, at least as keenly as
they did themselves, and yet he came out of it all with clear eyes and a
sound digestion. I presume the fact may have been that he unconsciously
regarded the whole affair somewhat as we do a drama in a theatre; it
works upon our sensibilities, and yet we do not believe that it is real.
There was nothing in the experience germane to his proper life; it could
not become a part of him, and therefore its posture towards him
remained inveterately objective. The only feature of it that quickened a
responsive chord in him was the revelation of the intolerable condition
of the sailors in many of our ships, and upon these abuses he enlarged
in his communications to Washington. Improvements were made in
consequence of his remonstrances; but the American merchant service had
already begun its downward career, and it is only very lately, owing to
causes which are too novel and peculiar to be intelligently discussed
as yet, that our flag is once more promising to compete against that of
England.

It would be misleading to say, however, that my father was not
interested in his consulate work; there was a practical side in him
which took hold of the business in man-fashion, and transacted it so
efficiently as to leave no room for criticism, and nobody can produce
voluntary effects without feeling in himself a reaction from them. He had
occasion to look into the privacy of many human hearts, to pity them and
advise them, and from such services and insights he no doubt obtained a
residue of wisdom which might be applied to his own ulterior uses.
These were indirect and incidental issues; but from the consulate qua
consulate Hawthorne was radically alien, and when he quitted it, he
carried away with him no taint or trace of it. As he says in his remarks
upon the subject, he soon came to doubt whether it were actually himself
who had been the incumbent of the office at all.

But Providence does not deny manna to man in his extremity, and to my
father it came in the shape of a few English friends, and in occasional
escapes from the office into the outside England where, after the
centuries of separation, he found so much with which he could still feel
profoundly akin. His most constant friendly visitor was Henry A. Bright,
a university man, the son of a wealthy local merchant, who sent ships
to Australia, and was related (as most agreeable Englishmen are--though
there are shining exceptions) to the aristocratic class. Bright, at this
time, could not have been over thirty years of age; he was intensely
English, though his slender figure and mental vivacity might make him
seem near to the conventional American type. But through him, as through
an open window, Hawthorne was enabled to see far into the very heart of
England. Bright not merely knew England; he was England, and England at
its best, and therefore also at its most insular and prejudiced. It
was unspeakably satisfying and agreeable to encounter a man at once so
uncompromising and so amiable, so wrong-headed (from the American point
of view) and so right-hearted. He was drawn to my father as iron is
drawn to the magnet; on every outward point they fought each other like
the knight errants of old, while agreeing inwardly, beneath the surface
of things, as few friends are able to agree. Each admired the other's
onslaughts and his prowess, and, by way of testifying his admiration,
strove to excel himself in his counter attacks. The debate was always
beginning, and in the nature of things it could never end; the effect
of their blows was only to hammer each the other more firmly into his
previous convictions. Probably all the things that are English and all
the things that are American never before or since received such full
and trenchant exposition as was given them by Hawthorne and by Bright.
The whole subject of monarchy and aristocracy as against republicanism
and democracy was threshed out to the last kernel by champions each of
whom was thoroughly qualified to vindicate his cause. Each, constrained
by the stress of battle to analyze and expound his beliefs more
punctually than ever before, thereby convinced himself while leaving his
adversary undaunted; and, of course, both were right. For this world is
so constituted that two things incompatible in outward manifestation may
in their roots be one and the same, and equally appeal to the suffrages
of honest men. England and America are healthy and vigorous in
proportion as they differ from each other, and a morbid and vicious
tendency in either is noticeable the moment either begins to take a
leaf from the other's book. My father and Bright could not have been the
lifelong friends that they were had either of them yielded his point or
stooped to compromise.

Apart from political matters, and such social themes as were nearly
allied to them, the two friends had many points of agreement and
sympathy. Bright had from the first been an ardent and intelligent
admirer of the romancer's writings, and though they might often differ
in their estimates of individual works, they were in hearty accord as
to the principles which underlie all literature and art. Upon matters
relating to society, my father was more apt to accept theories which
Bright might propound than to permit of their being illustrated in his
own person; he would admit, for example, that a consul ought to mingle
socially with the people to whom he was accredited; but when it came
to getting him out to dinner, in evening dress and with a speech in
prospect, obstacles started up like the armed progeny of the Dragon's
Teeth. For, though no one enjoyed real society more than he did, he was
ardently averse from conversing as an official with persons between whom
and himself as a man there could be little sympathy. Almost as much,
too, did he dislike to meet the polite world merely on the basis of the
books that he had written, which his entertainers were bound to
praise whether or not they had read or comprehended them, and to whose
well-meant but inexpert eulogies he must constantly respond with the
threadbare and pathetic phrase, "I'm glad you liked it." Bright, of
course, insisted that fame and position carried obligations which must
be met, and he was constantly laying plots to inveigle or surprise
his friend into compliance. He often succeeded, but he failed quite as
frequently, so that, as a Mrs. Malaprop might have said, Hawthorne as
a social lion was a rara avis, from first to last. The foible of
artificial, as distinguished from spontaneous, society is that it so
seldom achieves simple human relations.

Another chief friend of his was Francis Bennoch. England would never
have seemed "our old home" to my father, without the presence and
companionship of these two men. Both had literary leanings, both were
genial, true, and faithful; but in other respects they were widely
dissimilar. Bright was of the pure Saxon type; Bennoch represented Great
Britain at large; there were mingled in him English, Irish, and
Scotch ancestry. In himself he was a superb specimen of a human being;
broad-shouldered, straight, and vigorous, massive but active, with a
mellow, joyful voice, an inimitable brogue, sparkling black eyes full
of hearty sunshine and kindness, a broad and high forehead over bushy
brows, and black, wavy hair. He bubbled over with high spirits, humor,
and poetry, being, indeed, a poet in achievement, with a printed
and bound volume to show for it--songs, lyrics, and narrative poems,
composed in the spirit of Burns and Scott. He was at this time one
of the handsomest men in England, with a great heart, warmer than any
summer England ever knew, and a soul of ardor and courage, which sent
through his face continual flashes of sympathy and fellowship. One
naturally thought and spoke of him in superlatives; he was the kindest,
jolliest, most hospitable, most generous and chivalrous of men, and
his affection and admiration for my father were also of the superlative
kind. He had made a fortune in the wool business, and had an office
in Wood Street, London; but his affairs permitted him to make frequent
excursions to Liverpool, and to act as his American friend's guide
and cicerone to many places in England which would otherwise have been
unknown to him. My father enjoyed these trips immensely; Bennoch's
companionship gave the right keynote and atmosphere to the sights they
saw. A real Englishman owns his country, and does the honors of it to a
visitor as if it were his private estate. Discussions of politics and of
the principles of government never arose between these two, as they did
between my father and Bright; for Bennoch, though one of the most loyal
and enthusiastic of her Majesty's subjects, and full of traditional
respect for the British nobility, was by nature broadly democratic,
and met every man as an equal and a brother. One often finds this
contradiction in Englishmen; but it is such logically only. A man
born to the traditions of monarchy and aristocracy accepts them as the
natural background of his ideas, just as the English landscape is the
setting of his house and park; he will vindicate them if assailed; but
ordinarily they do not consciously affect his mental activities, and he
will talk good republicanism without being aware of it. The monarchy is
a decoration, a sentiment, a habit; as a matter of fact, England is more
democratic in many essentials than we have as yet learned how to
be. Bennoch was not a university man, and lacked the historical
consciousness that Bright so assiduously cultivated; he lived by feeling
and intuition more than by deliberate intellectual judgments. He was
emotional; tears would start to his eyes at a touch of pathos or pity,
as readily as the laughter of a moment before. So lovable, gallant,
honest, boyish a man is seldom born into this modern world-boyish as
only the manliest men can be. He died thirty years after the time I
write of, the same fresh and ardent character as ever, and loving and
serving Hawthorne's children for Hawthorne's sake. I shall have occasion
to mention him hereafter; but I have dwelt upon him here, both because
he made it forever impossible for any one who knew him well to do other
than love the land which could breed such a man, and because, for the
American Hawthorne, he was as a hospitable gate-way through which the
England of his dreams and imaginings was entered upon as a concrete and
delightful reality.

With Bright and Bennoch on his right hand and on his left, then, my
father began his English experience. The two are frequently mentioned
in his English journals, and Bennoch figures as one of the subordinate
characters in the posthumous romance called Doctor Grimshawe's Secret.
It is but a sketch of him, however, and considerably modified from the
brilliant and energetic reality. Meanwhile the consul began to accustom
himself to the routine of the consulate, and his family, leaving the
sombre respectability of the Waterloo Hotel, moved, first, to the
hospitable boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, and afterwards to a private
dwelling in Rock Park, Rock Ferry, on the opposite side of the Mersey,
where we were destined to dwell for several years. They were years full
of events very trifling in themselves, but so utterly different from
everything American as to stamp themselves upon the attention and the
memory. It is the trifling things that tell, and give character to
nations; extraordinary things may occur anywhere, and possess little
national flavor. In another chapter I will attempt some portrayal of
this English life of fifty years since.




VI


     Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--
     Varieties of equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming
     peril--Being dragged to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and
     hopelessness of destitution--Villages rooted in the
     landscape--Evanescence of the spiritual and survival of the
     material--"Of Bebbington the holy peak"--The Old Yew of
     Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and afternoon
     tea--An East-Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in
     the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to
     Longfellow--Real breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-
     pugilist--Clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry--A respectable female
     atheist--The tragedy of the red ants--Voluptuous struggles--
     A psalm of praise.

In a country whose ruling principle is caste, it might be expected that
the line of cleavage between the upper and the lower grades would be
punctually observed. It is assumed that democracy levels and aristocracy
distinguishes and separates. My father was not long in remarking,
however, that there was a freedom of intercourse between the patrician
and the plebeian--between people of all orders--such as did not exist in
America. And the fact, once perceived, was not difficult of explanation.
In a monarchy of a thousand years' standing, every individual knows his
place in the social scale and never thinks of leaving it. He represents
a fixed function or element in the general organism, and holds to it as
a matter of course, just as, in the human body, the body does not aspire
to be the head, nor the liver or heart to take the place of lungs
or stomach. The laborer looks back upon an ancestry of laborers; the
shopkeeper has been a shopkeeper for unnumbered generations; the artisan
on the bench to-day does the same work that his father and grandfathers
did before him; the noble inherits his acres as inevitably as the sun
rises, and sits in the House of Lords by immemorial usage and privilege.
Social position all along the line being thus anchored in the nature
of things, as it were, there is no anxiety on any one's part as to
maintaining his status. He is secure where he is, and nothing and nobody
can change him. There is no individual striving to rise nor fear to
fall. Consequently there can and must be entire freedom of mutual
conversation; the marquis with a revenue of half a million a year meets
as an equal his gardener who gets ten pounds a month, and the tailor
in his measuring-room offers a glass of sherry to his noble patron who
comes to him for a new coat. Each is at his ease, conscious that he
performs a use and fills a place which no one else can fill or perform,
and that nothing else matters. The population is a vast mutual-benefit
association, without envy on the one side or contempt on the other. And
social existence moves as smoothly as a well-oiled and adjusted machine.

This agreeable condition is impossible in a democracy--at all events, in
a democracy like ours, which is based upon the assumption that all men
are equal. Nevertheless, we are on the right track, and the English
are on the wrong one; for the agreeable English system obstructs the
insensible infiltration of fresh material into old forms, which is
essential to the continued health of the latter; while the democracy,
on the other hand, will gradually learn that it is just as honorable and
desirable to be a good shoemaker, for example, as a good millionaire;
that human life, in short, is a complex of countless different uses,
each one of which is as important on its own plane as any of the others.
But the intermediate period is undeniably irksome.

So my father noticed, not without a certain satisfaction, that even
beggars, in England, are not looked down upon, and that their rights,
such as they are, are recognized. In the steamboat waiting-room at Rock
Ferry, and in the boats themselves, he saw tramps and mendicants take
the best place at the fire or on the companion-way without rebuke and
without consciousness of presumption, and he saw the landlord of a
hotel, with a fortune of six hundred thousand pounds, wait at table
as deferentially as any footman in his employ. He was struck by the
contentment with which, in winter, women went barefoot in the streets,
and by the unpretentious composure with which the common herd, on
holidays, disported themselves in public, not seeking to disguise their
native vulgarity and shabbiness. At the same time, he could not help
a misgiving that the portentous inequality between rich and poor must
finally breed disaster; the secluded luxury of the rich was too strongly
contrasted with the desperate needs of the poor. This contrast was very
marked in England fifty years ago, and was comparatively unknown in our
own country--though to-day we can hardly lay to our souls the nattering
unction of such a difference. The rage for wealth has done for us in a
generation what caste did for England in a thousand years.

My father, when opportunity offered, was always finding himself among
the poor and their dwellings; he had to be dragged to the rich, though
among them, too, he found, when brought in contact with them, many
interesting points of dissimilarity from ourselves. His office as consul
naturally took him often to the police courts, where magistrates passed
upon the squalid cases cited before them, and in the consulate itself
he saw specimens enough of human crime and misery. He visited the
poor-house and the insane asylum, he was approached by swindlers of all
types, and often he went to fairs and other resorts of public out-door
amusement and watched the unwashed populace at its play. Beggars
followed him on the streets, awaited him in their chosen coigns of
vantage on the corners, or haunted him on the ferry-boat that took
him each day from his home to his office. Wherever he encountered
the forsaken of fortune, he found food for sympathy, and, in spite of
assurances that he was only encouraging mendicancy, he often gave them
money. It was hard for him to believe that there could be abject poverty
where there was work for all, and the appeal of man in want to man in
plenty was too strong for him easily to resist it. He liked the very
frankness of vulgarity and hopeless destitution of these people, and was
appalled by the simplicity with which they accepted things as they were.
There was no restlessness, as in America--no protest against fate. It
was harrowing enough to see conditions so miserable; it was intolerable
to see them acquiesced in by the victims as inevitable. He learned,
after a while, to harden himself somewhat against manifest imposition;
but the refusal to give cost him quite as much in discomfort as giving
did in purse.

The country villages and cottages, however, afforded him compensating
pleasure. In the neighborhood of Rock Ferry, on the shore of the
Mersey opposite from Liverpool, there were two or three ancient little
settlements which he loved to visit. The thatched and whitewashed
cottages, with their tiny gardens of hollyhocks and marigolds, seemed
like parts of the framework of the land; the passage of centuries only
served to weld them more firmly in their places. The villages were
massed together, each in a small space, instead of being dispread
loosely over a township, as in his native New England, and enduring
stone and plaster took the place of timber and shingles. But the
churches, small and fabulously ancient, affected him most. He placed his
hand on stones which had been set in place before William the Conqueror
landed in England, and this physical survival seemed to bring into his
actual presence the long succession of all the intervening ages. These
structures, still so solid and serviceable, had witnessed the passing of
the entire procession of English history; all the mighty men and events
of her career had come and gone while they remained unscathed. Under his
feet were the graves of the unknown dead; within the narrow precincts he
inhaled that strange, antique odor of mortality that made him feel as
if he were breathing the air of long-dead centuries. This apparent
evanescence of the spiritual attested by the survival of the material is
one of the most singular and impressive of sensations; it takes history
out of the realm of the mind, and brings it into sensible manifestation.
It is almost as affecting as if the very figures of departed actors of
former ages were to reappear and rub shoulders with us of today, and
cast their shadows in the contemporary sunshine.

On most of these walks in the neighborhood of Rock Ferry I was my
father's companion, but, though my legs could march beside his, my
mental-equipment could not participate in his meditations. He would
occasionally make some half-playful, imaginative remark, calculated to
help me realize the situation that was so vividly present to himself.
His thoughts, however deep, were always ready to break into playfulness
outwardly. We often walked through the village of Bebbington, whose
church had a high stone steeple, nearly to the summit of which the
ancient ivy had clambered. And as it came in view he would always say,
in a sort of recitative, perhaps reminiscent of Scott's narrative poems,
which he was at that time reading aloud to us, "There is of Bebbington
the holy peak!" To which I would as constantly rejoin, "'Of Bebbington
the holy spire,' father!"--being offended by his use of a word so
unmusical as peak. He would only smile and trudge onward. He was
somewhat solicitous, I suspect, to check in his son any tendency towards
mere poetical sentiment; his own imaginative faculty was rooted in
common-sense, and he knew the value of the latter in curbing undue
excursions into the fanciful and transcendental.

In Eastham, on the village green, stood an old yew-tree which, six
centuries before, had been traditionally called The Old Yew of Eastham,
and was probably at least coeval with the village itself, which was one
of the oldest in England. It was of enormous girth, and was still in
leaf; but nothing but the bark was left of the great trunk; all the wood
had decayed away so long ago that the memory of man held no record of
it. There was a great conical gap in one side, like an open door, and it
was my custom--as it had doubtless been that of innumerable children of
ages gone--to enter this door and "play house" in the spacious interior.
Meanwhile my father would seat himself on the twisted roots without, and
let his thoughts drift back to the time when this huge hulk had first
cast a slender shadow over the greensward of primitive, Saxon England.
It was a massive tree before the Domesday Book was begun; Chaucer
would not be heard of for four hundred years to come; and where was
Shakespeare? What was suspected of America? Yet here was this venerable
vegetable, still with life enough left in it, perhaps, to see the end of
English monarchy. The yew was a fact; but the ghosts were the reality,
after all.

These obscure village antiquities, which had no special history
attaching to them, were in a way more impressive than the great ruins of
England, which had formed the scene and background of famous events. The
latter had become conventional sights, which the tourist felt bound to
inspect under the voluble and exasperating guidance of a professional
showman; and this malice-prepense sort of interest and picturesqueness
always tried Hawthorne's patience and sympathy a little. It is the
unknown past that is most fascinating, that comes home closest to the
heart. The things told of in history books are hackneyed, and they
partake of the unreality inherent in the descriptions of the writers.
But the unrecorded things are virgin, and enter into our most private
sympathies and realization. My father viewed and duly admired the
great castles, palaces, and cathedrals of England; but he loved the old
villages and their appurtenances, and could dream dreams more moving
under the shadow of Eastham Yew than in Westminster Abbey itself.

The historic houses and country-seats which were still inhabited were
still more difficult to get in touch with from the historic point of
view; the present dazzled the past out of sight. One was told who built
this facade, who added that wing, who was imprisoned in yonder tower;
where Queen Elizabeth slept, and the foot of what martyr imprinted the
Bloody Footstep on the threshold.

But you listened to these tales over a cup of tea in the drawing-room,
or between the soup and the roast beef at the dinner-table, and
they were not convincing. How were these ruddy-cheeked, full-bodied,
hospitable personages who sat about you to be held compatible with the
romantic periods and characters that they described? The duck and the
green pease, the plum-pudding and the port, the white neck-cloths and
the bare necks were too immediate and potent. In many cases, too,
the denizens of the ancient houses were not lineal descendants of the
original founders; they were interlopers, by purchase or otherwise. In
themselves they were kind and agreeable, their manners were excellent,
they helped one to comprehend the England of the passing moment; but
they only clipped the wings of imagination and retrospect. It was
only after an interval of some years that Hawthorne was able so far to
recover from the effect of their obtrusive existence as to be able to
see through them and beyond them to the splendid and gloomy vistas in
front of which they were grouped.

Yet England, past and present, rich and poor, real and ideal, did
somehow enter into him and become a part of his permanent consciousness,
and he liked it better than anything else he had known. Even the social
life, though he came to it under some compulsion, rewarded him in the
long run. One of the first personal invitations was to the country-seat
of the Brights, where he met the family and relatives of his friend
Henry Bright. Bright's father was a remarkable figure; he resembled an
East-Indian more than an Englishman. He was dark, slender, courteous,
and vivid; in long after-years I saw Brahmins like him in India. I would
liken him to a rajah, except that rajahs of his age are commonly become
gross and heavy from indulgence, whereas he had an almost ascetic
aspect. His manners were singularly soft and caressing; he courted his
wife, when he returned each day from business, as if they were still
in their honeymoon, and his conduct towards all who surrounded him was
similarly polished. He did not in the least resemble his Saxon son; and
for my part, looking at him from the primitive boy stand-point, I never
suspected that he was related to my father's young friend. He had made a
fortune in colonial trade, and may possibly have been born in India. At
this juncture the dealings of his firm were chiefly with Australia, and
the largest merchant steamship then in the world had just been built for
them, and Hawthorne was invited to the launching. For a British merchant
prince such an occasion could not but be of supreme importance and
pride. Mr. Bright's Oriental visage was radiant; his white hair seemed
to shine with an added lustre; the reserve of the Englishman was
forgotten, and he showed the excitement and emotion that he felt. There
was a distinguished company on the great deck to witness his triumph
and congratulate him upon it. All went well; at the appointed signal the
retaining obstructions were cut away, and the mighty vessel began its
descent into the waiting river. A lady of his family smashed a bottle
of wine over the graceful bows. For a few moments there was a majestic,
sweeping movement downward; then, of a sudden, it was checked. It was
as if a great life had been quenched at the instant when its heart first
began to throb. A murmur of dismay ran through the assemblage; but it
was in the face of Mr. Bright that the full tragedy of the disaster was
displayed. Never was seen a swifter change from the highest exultation
to the depths of consternation. The color left his cheeks; heavy lines
appeared about his handsome mouth; his eyes became fixed, and seemed to
sink into his head; his erect figure drooped like that of one who has
received a mortal blow. It was only that the ship had stuck in the deep
mud of the river bottom; but all ship-owners are superstitious, and the
old man foreboded the worst. The ship was floated again some days later;
but the omens were fulfilled; she was lost on her first voyage. I do not
remember seeing Mr. Bright after this event, but I know he never again
was the same man as before.

Richard Monckton Milnes, who was afterwards Lord Houghton, was greatly
attracted towards my father, who liked him; but circumstances prevented
their seeing much of each other. Milnes was then forty-five years old;
he was a Cambridge man, and intimate with Tennyson, Hallam, and other
men of literary mark, and he was himself a minor poet, and warm in the
cause of literature. During his parliamentary career, in 1837, he was
instrumental in passing the copyright act. He had travelled in Greece
and Italy in his twenties; was fond of society, and society of him. A
more urbane and attractive English gentleman did not exist; everything
that a civilized man could care for was at his disposal, and he made the
most of his opportunities. His manners were quiet and cordial, with a
touch of romance and poetry mingling with the man-of-the-world tone in
his conversation, and he was quite an emotional man. I have more than
once seen tears in his eyes and heard a sob in his voice when matters
that touched his heart or imagination were discussed. There was, indeed,
a vein of sadness and pessimism in Milnes, though only his intimates
were aware of it; it was the pessimism of a man who has too much leisure
for intellectual analysis and not enough actual work to do to keep him
occupied. It lent a fine flavor of irony to some of his conversation.
He was liberal in politics and liberal in his attitude towards life in
general; but there was not force enough in him, or, at any rate, not
stimulus enough, to lift him to distinction. Some of his poems, however,
betrayed a deep and radical vein of thought. He was of middle height,
well made, light built, with a large and well-formed head and wavy, dark
hair. His likeness to Longfellow was marked, though he was hardly so
handsome a man; but the type of head and face was the same--the forehead
and brain well developed, the lower parts of the countenance small and
refined, though sensuous. His eyes were dark, brilliant, and expressive.
He, like the old poet Rogers, made a feature of giving breakfasts to
chosen friends, and as he had the whole social world to choose from,
and unfailing good taste, his breakfasts were well worth attending. They
were real breakfasts--so far as the hour was concerned--not lunches or
early dinners in masquerade; but wine was served at them, and Milnes
was very hospitable and had an Anacreontic or Omar touch in him.
To breakfast with him, therefore, meant--unless you were singularly
abstemious and strong-minded--to discount the remaining meals of the
day. But the amount of good cheer that an Englishman can carry and seem
not obscured by it surprises an American. A bottle or so of hock of a
morning will make most Americans feel that business, for the rest of
that day, is an iridescent dream; but an Englishman does not seem to be
burdened by it--at any rate, he did not fifty years ago.

[IMAGE: RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES]

Another hearty companion was Bryan Waller Procter, who, for literary
uses, anagrammed his name into Barry Cornwall, and made it famous, fifty
years ago, as that of the best song-writer in contemporary England. But
he had made a literary reputation before the epoch of his songs; there
were four or five dramatic and narrative poems to his credit published
during the first quarter of the last century. Procter was, indeed,
already a veteran in 1854, having been born in 1787, and bred to the
bar, to which he was admitted in 1831. But he spent the active thirty
years of his life in the discharge of that function which seems often
sought by respectable Englishmen-commissioner of lunacy. He sent my
father a small volume containing the Songs, and some fragments; they
fully deserved their reputation. The fragments were mostly scraps of
dramatic dialogue, of which one at least sticks in my memory:

"She was a princess; but she fell; and now Her shame goes blushing down
a line of kings."

As I recollect him, he may have looked like a commissioner of lunacy,
but he did not look like a poet; he was rather undersized, with a
compact head and a solemn face, and the quietest, most unobtrusive
bearing imaginable. He was a well-made little man, and he lived to a
great age, dying some time in the seventies, at the age of eighty-seven.
He told my father that after leaving Harrow School he was distinguished
in athletics, and for a time sparred in public with some professional
bruiser. He had been a school-mate of Byron and Sir Robert Peel, and had
known Lamb, Kean, and the other lights of that generation. He was a most
likeable and remunerative companion. His wife, who survived him (living,
I think, to be over ninety), was a woman of intellect and charm, and she
retained her attractiveness to the end of her life. There are poets who
are consumed early by their own fires, and others who are gently warmed
by them beyond the common span of human existence, and Barry Cornwall
was one of these, and transmitted his faculty, through sympathetic
affection, to his wife.

Of renown not less than the song-writer's was the metaphysical
theologian, James Martineau, then in the Liverpool epoch of his career.
He was a clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry character, with a somewhat
Emersonian cast of countenance, but with the Emersonian humanity and
humility left out. Like Emerson, he had ascended a Unitarian pulpit,
but, unlike Emerson, he stayed there long after what he was pleased to
regard as his convictions had ceased to possess even a Unitarian degree
of religious quality. He was always apostolic in his manner, and his
utterances were ex cathedra, and yet his whole long life was a story
of changing views on the subjects he had chosen to be the theme of his
career.

He was the great opponent of orthodoxy in his day, yet he led his
followers to no goal more explicit than might be surmised from a study
of Kant and Hegel. He was, however, sincere in his devotion to
the will-o'-the-wisp that he conceived to be the truth, and he was
courageous enough to admit that he never satisfied himself. There was
chilly and austere attraction about the man; he was so elevated
and superior that one could hardly help believing that he must know
something of value, and this illusion was the easier because he did know
so much in the way of scholarly learning. My father felt respect for
his character, but was bored by his metaphysics--a form of intellectual
athletics which he had exhausted while still a young man. James's sister
Harriet was also of the company. She was so deaf as to be obliged to use
an ear-trumpet, and she was as positive in her views (which had become
avowedly atheistic) as her brother, and whenever any one began to
utter anything with which she disagreed, she silenced him by the simple
expedient of dropping the ear-trumpet. In herself, she was an agreeable
old lady; but she seldom let her opinions rest long enough for one to
get at her on the merely human side, and she cultivated a retired life,
partly on account of her deafness, partly because her opinions made
society shy of her, and partly because she did not think society worth
her time and attention. She was a good woman, with a mind of exceptional
caliber, but the world admired more than it desired her.

As a relief from the consideration of these exalted personages, I am
disposed to relate a tragic anecdote about our friend Henry Bright.
Early in our Rock Ferry residence he came to dine with us--or I rather
think it was to supper. At any rate, it was an informal occasion, and
the children were admitted to table. My mother had in the cupboard a jar
of excellent raspberry jam, and she brought it forth for the delectation
of our guest. He partook of it liberally, and said he had never eaten
any jam so good; it had a particular tang to it, he declared, which
outdid his best recollections of all previous raspberry jam from his
boyhood up. While he was in the midst of these rhapsodies, and still
consuming their subject with enthusiasm, my mother, who had taken some
of the jam on her own plate, suddenly made a ghastly discovery. The
jam-pot had been for several days standing in the cupboard with its top
off, or ajar, and an innumerable colony of almost microscopic red ants
had discovered it, and launched themselves fervently upon it and into
it; it had held them fast in its sweet but fatal embrace, and other
myriads had followed their fellows into the same delicious and
destructive abyss. What the precise color of the ants may have been
before they became incorporate with the jam is not known; but as the
case was, they could be distinguished from it only by their voluptuous
struggles in its controlling stickiness. Only the keenest eye could
discern them, and the eyes of Henry Bright were among the most
near-sighted in England. Besides, according to his custom, he was
talking with the utmost volubility all the time.

What was to be done? My father and mother stealthily exchanged an awful
look, and the question was settled. It was too late to recall the
ants which our friend had devoured by tens of thousands. It seemed not
probable that, were he kept in ignorance of his predicament, they
would do him any serious bodily injury; whereas, were he enlightened,
imagination might get in her fatal work. Accordingly, a rigorous silence
upon the subject was maintained, and the dear innocent actually devoured
nearly that whole potful of red ants, accompanying the meal with a
continual psalm of praise of their exquisite flavor; and never till the
day of his death did he suspect what the secret of that flavor was. I
believe the Chinese eat ants and regard them as a luxury. Very likely
they are right; but at that period of my boyhood I had not heard of
this, and then and often afterwards did I meditate with misgivings upon
the predicament of Henry Bright's stomach after his banquet.




VII


     Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--
     The average man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--
     Shielded by rose-leaves of culture and refinement--The
     English middle class--Prejudice, complacency, and Burke's
     Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or Browning--Satisfaction
     in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp, winding,
     verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of
     individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff-dwelling--"The
     Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgiliance--A division in
     the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and
     card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry--
     Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the
     cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr.
     Squarey and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of
     jolly.

That life at Rock Park had in it more unadulterated English quality than
any other with which we became conversant while in England. With the
exception of a short sojourn in Leamington, it was the only experience
vouchsafed us of renting a house. All the rest of the time we lived in
lodging or boarding houses, or in hotels. The boarding-houses of England
are like other boarding-houses; the hotels, or inns, in the middle of
the last century, were for the most part plain and homely compared with
what we have latterly been used to; but the English lodging-house system
had peculiarities. You enjoyed independence, but you paid for it with
inconveniences. The owner of the house furnished you with nothing except
the house, with its dingy beds, chairs, tables, and carpets. Everything
else necessary to existence you got for yourself. You made your own
contracts with butcher, baker, and grocer. You did your own firing and
lighting. Your sole conversation with the owner was over the weekly bill
for the rooms. You might cater to yourself to the tune of the prince or
of the pauper, as your means or your inclination suggested, but you
must do it upon the background of the same dingy rooms. Dingy or not so
dingy, the rooms, of course, never fitted you; they were a Procrustes
bed, always incompatible, in one way or in another, with the proportions
which nature had bestowed upon you. You wondered, in your misanthropic
moments, whether there ever was or could be any one whom English
lodgings would exactly fit. Probably they were designed for the average
man, a person, as we all know, who exists only in the imagination of
statisticians. And if the environment shows the man, one cannot help
rejoicing that there is so little likelihood of one's forming the
average man's acquaintance.

There was nothing peculiar about rented houses in England beyond the
innate peculiarities attaching to them as English. If the house were
unfurnished, and you had leisure to pick and choose, you might suit
yourself tolerably well, always with the proviso that things English
could be suitable to the foreigner. And certainly, in the 1850's, the
English commanded living conditions more desirable, on the whole, than
Americans did. They understood comfort, as distinct from luxury--a pitch
of civilization to which we are even now but just attaining. There
was not then, and until the millennium there will probably never be,
anything else in the world which so ministered to physical ease and
general satisfaction as did the conditions of life among the English
upper classes. Kublai Khan, in Xanadu, never devised a pleasure-dome so
alluring to mere human nature-especially the English variety of it--as
was afforded by an English nobleman's country-seat. Tennyson's Palace
of Art is very good in poetry, but in real life the most imaginative and
energetic real-estate dealer could not have got so good a price for it
as would gladly have been paid for the dwelling of, for example,
the Duke of Westminster. "How many gardeners have you got?" asked an
American Minister of the duke of the period, after meeting a fresh
gardener, during a long afternoon stroll through the grounds, at each
new turn of the path. "Oh, I don't know--I fancy about forty," replied
the duke, somewhat taken aback by this demand for precise information
concerning the facts of his own establishment, which, until that moment,
he probably supposed had been attended to by Providence. And really,
the machinery of life in such a place is so hidden, it is so nearly
automatic, that one might easily believe it to be operated according to
some law of nature. The servants are (or were) so well trained, they did
their jobs so well, that you were conscious only of their being done;
you never saw them a-doing. The thought happened to cross your mind, of
a morning, that you would like to take a drive at eleven o'clock; you
were not aware that you had mentioned the matter; but at eleven o'clock
the carriage was, somehow, at the door. At dinner, the dishes appeared
and disappeared, the courses succeeded one another, invisibly, or as if
by mere fiat of the will; you must be very wide-awake to catch a footman
or butler meddling with the matter. You went up to the bedroom to change
your dress; you came down with it changed; but only by an effort could
you recall the fact that a viewless but supremely efficient valet had
been concerned in the transaction. The coal fire in the grate needed
poking; you glanced away for a moment; when you looked at the fire again
it had been poked--had, to all appearance, poked itself. And so in all
relations; to desire was to get; to picture a condition was to realize
it. You were shielded on every side by rose-leaves of culture and
refinement; all you had to do was to allow your mind to lapse from
one conception to another, and then, lifting your languorous eyelids,
behold! there you were--as Mr. James would say.

But I set out to tell not of noblemen's country-seats, but of Rock
Park. Rock Park was one of the typical abodes of the English respectable
middle-class, and the English middle-class, respectable, or not
altogether respectable, is the substance of England. Not until you have
felt and smelt and tasted that do you know what England really is.
Fifty years ago, the people in question were dull, ignorant, material,
selfish, prejudiced, conventional; they were hospitable, on conventional
lines; they were affable and even social, so long as you did not awaken
their prejudices; they were confidential and communicative, if you
conceded at the outset that England was the best of all countries and
the English the leading nation of the world. They read a newspaper
resembling in every particular themselves; usually several of them
united in a subscription to a single copy, which passed solemnly from
hand to hand. They were slow and methodical, never taking short-cuts
across lots; but they were punctual; they knew their own business and
business associates, their circle of relatives, their dwelling and
social place, and Burke's Peerage; but they knew nothing else. In a
group of intelligent persons of this degree, question was raised, once
upon a time, of two English poets; but not one of the group had heard
of either; the poets were Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. This may
seem merely absurd or apocryphal; but consider the terrible power of
concentration which it implies! And consider the effect which the impact
against such a clay wall must make upon a man and an American like my
father!

Well, the very surprise and novelty of the adventure amused and
interested him, and even won a good deal upon his sympathies. He loved
the solid earth as well as the sky above it, and he was glad of the
assurance that this people existed, though he might be devoutly thankful
that two hundred years of America had opened so impassable a gulf
between him and them. Indeed, the very fact of that impassability may
have made his intercourse with them the easier--at any rate, on
his side. On their side, they regarded him with a dim but always
self-complacent curiosity; had he not been a consul, they would probably
not have regarded him at all. Of course they--the Rock Park sort of
people--had never read his books; literary cultivation was not to
be found in England lower down than the gentleman class. My father,
theref

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