Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife

CIVILIZATION brings changes. In barbarous regions, when a man is thought to have outlived his usefulness, a son or a friend takes him to some secluded spot, and knocks him on the head. We have outgrown barbarism, and now the relatives await the natural demise, and then perform the post mortem. Either process interests the public and attracts an audience ; but owing to the discovery of the art of printing, the modern method reaches more people. There is also the difference that, whereas the savage victim— so some writers assure us — took the process as a matter of course, and never objected, the civilized sufferer sometimes invites the autopsy and sometimes demurs. Carlyle insisted upon it, according to Mr. Froude; Hawthorne objected to it, as we know. Had he written poetry, he might possibly have entered as distinct a protest as Tennyson : —

Shakespeare’s curse proved sufficient, because he left no sons. Tennyson’s time has not yet come, and may it be long postponed; he has not yet gone down into his grave, but only into the House of Lords. But let him beware, — he too has sons; and after Hawthorne, who is safe ?

The previous memoir by Mr. Lathrop, the son-in-law, was guarded, delicate, and therefore unsatisfactory. When is the public ever satisfied, so long as there is a “ lock and seal ” unbroken ? So far as it lies in Mr. Julian Hawthorne, — and it lies in him pretty thoroughly, — the ultimate facts are now given without compunction; and as if to show that he loves his father as himself, he offers a liberal share of his own autobiography besides. Often the result is interesting, since the fatherly side of a great writer is always attractive. But after all, it is the writer, and not the father, who stands first in the public mind, and we could have done without many minutiæ as to the little Julian’s feats of swimming and his torn garments for some added knowledge as to the genesis of the most remarkable fictitious writings of modern times. In the case of Hawthorne we especially need that knowledge “as to his chief works, their motives and origins,” which the publishers rashly promised in their advertisement, but which Mr. Julian Hawthorne has almost completely withheld. The interest of these pages lies almost wholly in their private aspects ; they leave Hawthorne the author almost as much a sealed book to us as before.

For it is to be observed that in attempting to apply to this book the ordinary standards of biographical work we are met and defied at the outset. The corner-stone of a memoir would naturally seem to be the birthday of the person described, but we turn over nearly a hundred pages to discover when Hawthorne was born, and find it at last incidentally mentioned in somebody’s letter on the ninety-eighth page. The biography of an author should properly end with a bibliography, but we look for one vainly at the end of this work, and find only a fragmentary list at the middle of the first volume (i. 175) ; and this relates only to the earlier works, and entirely omits Hawthorne’s very interesting contributions to the once-famous Peter Parley books. As we read the book, we come upon singular instances of unfamiliarity with very common things, as when (i. 10) the author apparently assumes that the speaker of a legislative body is so called because he makes speeches, and says of an ancestor who for more than twenty years presided over the Massachusetts House of Representatives, “ Some echoes of his eloquence have come down to posterity ; and it must have been of a sturdy and trenchant sort to hold the ears of Puritan law-givers so long” (i. 10). There are repeated inaccuracies in names and other words : thus we have “ Hodgson ” for “ Hodgdon ” (i. 152); “ Camberling ” for “ Cambreling ” (i. 153, 155); “ Healy” for “ Haley” (i. 235) ; “Morton” for “ Norton” (ii. 24, 27, 444); “ Soldanha ” for “ Saldanha ” (ii. 87) ; “ sandades ” for “ saudades ” (ii. 101). In another place he spoils the celebrated joke, “ Ne laissez pas ie feu sortir,” by substituting faire for feu (ii. 145). In some cases the fault may be simply in the proof-reading, but the author himself makes it a serious charge against the Saturday Review that it changed Hawthorne’s “ Miriam ” to “ Miriani ” (ii. 251), which can hardly have been anything but a typographical error. In many places we have inelegancies of expression that make us view with regret the fact mentioned by the editor with a sort of satisfaction, that he himself was always near the foot of his class at Harvard College (ii. 330). Thus we have “ children to be born and raised ” (i. 245) ; “ what De Quincey thought of Hawthorne’s writings, or whether he ever read them, we have no record ” (ii. 9) ; “ never has the present writer consumed so much food, . . . or of better quality than” etc. (ii. 18) ; “ taking with her her two daughters ” (ii. 68) ; “ young girls and fellows ” (ii. 321), and the like. Sometimes he omits very essential parts of the information he undertakes to give, as when, for instance, describing the Peabody bookstore in Boston (i. 262), he omits the essential point that it was chiefly a foreign bookstore, something then quite rare. Sometimes, again, he seems rather to mistake his father’s position. Thus in speaking of the civil war, he says, “ To maintain that we were ready to imperil our life mainly out of regard to the liberation of the negroes was, in his opinion, to utter sentimental nonsense ” (ii. 271), whereas, in a letter of Hawthorne’s, six pages on, he says, “ If we are fighting for the annihilation of slavery, it may be a wise object, and offer a tangible result” (ii. 277).

Considered as a revelation of private life, this book has at least two merits, one of which is rare. It is not uncommon for the sons or daughters of a great man to write of him in a tone of absolutely uncritical admiration ; though this is, on the whole, a merit, and one possessed by this book in a supreme degree. But the memoir has the much rarer merit of being written about Nathaniel Hawthorne “and his wife.” Few children of authors pursue literally the scriptural injunction, “ Honor thy father and thy mother ; ” and here this memoir strikes at the outset a high note. The mode of treatment undoubtedly invites questions, which never would occur to the biographer himself, as to the entire perfection of the married life which had so many lovely aspects ; but it is a great thing to know that Mr. Julian Hawthorne, whose previous writings have never given marked indications of any very refined sensibilities, really becomes tender, and almost poetic, whenever he speaks of his mother. In this he only imitates the habitual tone employed by his father. There is not, perhaps, recorded in biographical literature a more complete and unsullied union of love than that which bound this gifted husband and gifted wife together. It would not be right to suggest that it was too complete ; but the question must certainly present itself to the careful reader whether the good effect of such engrossing love was in this case unalloyed. Mutual absorption, beyond a certain point, may partake of what may be called duplex selfishness. Hawthorne came to his wife from a morbidly recluse existence ; she came to him from a sick-room. From the moment of contact they clung to each other, but it is hard to resist the conclusion that they helped each other to do without mankind outside. It is as if they had spent their lives within some magic glass, rose-tinted, but whose impassable crystal kept out all but the faintest vibrations of the busy world. In one place the editor speaks of his mother’s “winning and humane characteristics,” but there is throughout her correspondence scarcely a glimpse of those wider sympathies that are in a proper sense humane. There is only that utter merging of the wife in the husband which is the ideal of so many pious souls; we never see her heart yearning toward the sorrows of the world about her. Only twice do we find any such wider sympathies exhibited by Hawthorne : once when stirred by the wrongs of sailors, and yet again during the civil war. At all other times the married pair lived with almost literal exclusiveness for themselves and their children. In no literary biography that we can remember is the realm of human beings at large so wholly spectacular and remote.

Had either of these gifted people been of eminently charitable judgment, the case would have been different. Testing them by the standard of the Carlyles, we cannot, indeed, call them habitually sarcastic ; but they clearly abetted each other in the practice of extremely sharp criticism on the very slightest grounds. To Mrs. Hawthorne, Theodore Parker was “ only a scholar, bold and unscrupulous, without a particle of originality ” (i. 269), — a description about us ingeniously remote from the truth as the famous definition of a crab given by Cuvier’s pupil. Hawthorne, in turn, found Thoreau “ as ugly as sin,” Margaret Fuller “ a humbug,” and could see in Emerson only a “ seeker for he knows not what ” (i. 293) and one “ stretching his hand out of cloudland in vain search for something real ” (i. 291). Even Mrs. Hawthorne was chiefly interested in Emerson for what he said about her husband, who “ seemed to fascinate him ” (i. 271). This is conjugal and not unpleasing; but it is curious to see, on comparing their situation with that of the Carlyles, how an unhappy and a happy married life may lead in some respects to the same results. Perhaps the moral is that all indulged selfishness — even if it is the selfishness àdeux, of very superior persons— may derange at last our relation to the larger world in which it is our lot to live, and so end in alienation or even bitterness in respect to our fellow-men.

A clear instance of the working of this mutual influence was in the natural wrath of the ladies of the Hawthorne family at the removal of Mr. Hawthorne from the Salem Custom House. There can be little doubt that their excess of sympathy stimulated him to an act which we now for the first time discover to have had a touch of vengeance in it. That they should have deplored his removal was a thing not unreasonable; but it was hardly needful to go farther, and assume that he who brought about the change must be a villain of the deepest dye. It is altogether probable that some one else had been removed when Hawthorne was appointed; and had these ladies ever seen villainy in that ? The offender, it seems, was no other than Mr. Charles W. Upham, the historian of witchcraft, and at one time a Congressman ; and we farther learn, with surprise, that he was the original of Judge Pyncheon, in The House of the Seven Gables. Mr. Julian Hawthorne seems to share in the family animosity, for he refers to this very well-known author in a withering manner as “ a Mr. Upham” (i. 336), and describes his conduct (in the index) as “ interference ” with the surveyorship, as if some one had not previously had to interfere to put his father in. It seems by a previous passage (i. 294) that Mr. Upham had himself been one of these who had thus assisted in Hawthorne’s behalf; and that the novelist was then indignant at being represented as being very poor and needing the office. Apparently the matter was complicated by some charges against Hawthorne of too much partisanship ; and there was a story — such as comes with a curious flavor of modernness in these days — of his dismissing two clerks who had not done enough for the party. This seems to be refuted ; but the whole matter looks, at this late date, a little childish. “ There he stands for all time,” says Mr. Julian Hawthorne about " a Mr. Upham,” " subtle, smooth, cruel, unscrupulous, perfectly recognizable to all who knew his real character,” — this stern inheritor of the family vendetta having been at the time of the original injury less than three years old. Really, this is to carry rather too much of the hereditary fends of Corsica and Arkansas into the serene paths of literature. In the days that preceded civil service reform, men in office were tenants at will; and Hawthorne had no more vested right in the Salem Custom House than had the man whom he had displaced, and who probably had no literary gifts to fall back upon. The general public cannot, at this distance of time, feel any great wrath against the Congressman who was incidentally the means of sending Hawthorne back to his natural career; and there is a sense of positive loss in knowing that the powerful delineation of Judge Pyncheon was in any respect due to a vulgar desire to “ get even ” with an enemy.

The same wholly conjugal standard of judgment was of course shown toward the most commonplace man who ever occupied the presidential chair, Franklin Pierce. It was no doubt an honest piece of loyalty in Hawthorne to write the campaign memoir, which did what it could to elevate its hero from his insignificance. It was not unnatural that so great a favor should be rewarded by President Pierce with the most lucrative office in his gift. Nobody grudged Hawthorne the office, and Charles Sumner took especial pains to secure the confirmation. There history might well leave the matter; but to Mrs. Hawthorne it was an affair not alone of fervid and enthusiastic gratitude, but of reverential admiration. She had previously written to her mother that President Pierce was “ an incorruptible patriot ; ” “ ambition has not touched him ; ” “ he is a deeply religious man.” “ As regards the Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Law, it is his opinion that these things must now be allowed — for the sake of the slave ! ” (i. 482, 483.) All this beforehand, but when the appointment to the Liverpool consulate was made it became “ a very noble act.” " General Pierce might have made great political capital out of it, if that were his way. Put, he acts from the highest, and not lowest, motives, and would make any sacrifices to the right” (ii. 12). Now it would be absurd, at this day, to count the transaction as in any way discreditable to Hawthorne or to Pierce: it was a bit of personal friendship upon both sides; but it was also, in its effect, one of the most politic acts that Pierce ever performed, and perhaps that by which he will be longest remembered, and it took a wife’s devotion to see it on the heroic side.

But this is not all; this was not the worst result of this mutual absorption. There is in this book a singular barrenness of intellectual companionship outside the home. Hawthorne lived in a time of very strong men. Of some of the strongest, as Garrison and Parker, he saw nothing and probably wished to see nothing; but he was on friendly terms with Emerson, Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, of all of whom we here find next to nothing, while we are expressly told that he declined to meet them at the dinners of the Saturday Club (ii. 276). The letters, published in full, of his few American correspondents betray habitually the tone of secondary minds, not of men meeting him on high ground. His English correspondents are better, but they certainly do not supply the companionship that such a man might be expected to seek. In some cases the letters are given so fully as to give an impression of “ padding,” as where we have nine consecutive pages of not very interesting epistles from Herman Melville (i. 398), and where, amid the early letters of Hawthorne and his wife, we come upon eight pages of Italian guidebook from George William Curtis, then in early youth. The correspondence with Fields might have given much that was interesting in a literary way, but this is wholly omitted. Hawthorne is thus made to present to us, beyond all other intellectual men on record, the spectacle of avoidance of his proper coinpeers. All this was unquestionably due in part to that absorbing domestic life, which, acting on his original temperament, still farther separated him from the world. Whenever he ventured out of this rarefied atmosphere, he sought, by natural reaction, a somewhat coarser aliment than he found at home. He would not dine with the Saturday Club, but he enjoyed playing euchre, evening after evening, with the sea-captains at his Liverpool boarding-house (ii. 74). This is not to attribute to him any low tendencies whatever, although his son takes pains to remark, with questionable taste, that he “ never was a tetotaller, any more than he was an abolitionist or a thug ” (i. 87); but it certainly seems a pity that he had not a fancy for the finer bread of human companionship, as well as for the bran and sawdust.

Even this is not all of the revelation made to us by the over-frankness of the son. He shows us in various ways that Hawthorne’s observation was far less close, his inferences far less trustworthy, than had hitherto been supposed. Take a single instance. We find Hawthorne, during the war, sitting for a long time in the company of a certain Maine colonel, home on a furlough, the centre of an admiring group ; he describes him minutely, and adds, “his shoulder-straps having two stars on them, in token of his rank” (ii. 319). But if this officer wore two stars, he was a major-general. How then could Hawthorne have made such a mistake ? There was not a tavern-crowd in the United States that would not have discriminated every five minutes in its form of address between “ colonel ” and “ general ; ” and the only plausible explanation is that Hawthorne put the shoulder-straps of one man — possibly a local militia-general — upon the shoulders of another. But granting that his ordinary discernment was as keen as has always been supposed, it was long ago pointed out by some of his English friends that his observations were sadly biased by another fact, — that he talked with very few people, and therefore could not correct one witness by another, but was apt to swallow the whole story that any informant told. Of this his biographer unconsciously gives several instances, the most striking being his talk with a garrulous American artist in Rome, who retailed the idle gossip of that period about Ossoli, — Margaret Fuller’s husband, — that he was “a boor,” ignorant “of his own language,” “ scarcely able to read at all,” and the like (i. 259). Ossoli’s letters had not then been published, — letters which, it is needless to say, effectually dispose of all this chatter, — and as Hawthorne, who seems rarely to have met an intellectual woman outside of his own and his wife’s family, had a natural distaste for Margaret Fuller, it is not perhaps strange that he was taken in by it. But the curious thing is that when his talkative informant, who, as a Vermont boy, had not always mingled exclusively with lords and ladies, went on to hold up the Ossolis to shame for supporting themselves, in times of revolution and distress, by honest industry, the remark did not open the eyes of Hawthorne to the fact that he was talking with a very poor type of scandal-monger. The truth is that, while Hawthorne constantly showed his genius in his penetrating glimpses of the world around him, he still saw most of its details through a glass, darkly ; his mental processes were unsteady and fragmentary, however brilliant, and it was only when he transmuted them into the final form of art that the result became great.

All these facts and results are brought together by Mr. Julian Hawthorne, with little sifting, not much method, and, it is needless to say, the most utter and heroic disregard of the sensibilities of any living person. Thus he prints from his father’s diary a long description, almost too frightful to put into words,—certainly to put into types, — of the precise appearance of the body of an innocent young girl who had drowned herself (i. 300). Had he introduced a series of photographs from the Paris morgue, the result would not have been more horrible ; yet there it is in print, although the relations and schoolmates of the poor girl may still live in Concord. In one place in his diary, Hawthorne writes a sarcasm, rather ill-natured and decidedly coarse, upon a lifelong friend of his, now residing in Cambridge, and his editor takes pains to print it. While in England, Hawthorne was a guest at a hospitable home, that of Mr. M. F. Tupper, the author of Proverbial Philosophy. He wrote home a long description of the visit, which fills eight pages of the book (ii. 108-116). In this he says that he “ instinctively knew [Tupper] to be a bore,” that he was “ the vainest little man of all little men,” and much more of the same description. Mr. Tupper and his family are still living, and yet Mr. Julian Hawthorne prints it all. In the same way, Mrs. Ainsworth, of Hawthorne’s favorite Smithell Hall, — where he found the bloody footstep, — is pilloried to all time as “a silly woman” (ii. 69), although she seems to have shown him kind hospitality, and may still be living ; as may Mr. Bromley Moore, of whom his guest complained that he alluded to the cost of his wines and valuables (ii. 41). Nay, the biographer apparently adds his own dislikes and grudges to those of his father, prints in full two innocent letters from a young poet (ii. 273) for no conceivable object but to turn them into ridicule, and goes out of his way (ii. 250) to vent his spite upon a very unimportant person, Mr. S. C. Hall.

But it is when we come to consider Mr. Julian Hawthorne’s omissions that the tone of the book is most extraordinary. That he should mention the fact of his sister Rose’s marriage, but entirely ignore, both in the text and in the index, the name of her husband, is peculiar enough; but it is the omission of the name of Mr. James T. Fields that is especially objectionable. From his attributes both as publisher and man, Mr. Fields was practically the centre of the literary society of Boston during much of Hawthorne’s career. A less discerning person would not have penetrated Hawthorne’s shell as he did; interposed as a medium between a shy writer and a slow public; invited him, tempted him, urged him, encouraged him, and volunteered to put the stamp of the world upon the gold of genius. All who knew the literary society of that period knew how thoroughly and habitually Fields did this. He believed ardently in every word that Hawthorne wrote; it would be almost true if we said that no man of his time believed in it so ardently, since such was Fields’s temperament. Every one who ever heard Mrs. Hawthorne talk about her husband’s literary career knows that, while it seemed to her a matter of course that all the world should bow down and acknowledge his greatness, she yet recognized Fields as the man who was first and most efficient in guiding the pilgrims to the shrine; and for this she expressed a gratitude which her son does not share. Who that will recur to the brief narrative long since given in this magazine (October, 1871), entitled An Evening with Mrs. Hawthorne, can help seeing the immense value to both the Hawthornes of that early morning call, when Fields broke in upon their solitude to tell them that he had sat up all night to read the manuscript of the Scarlet Letter. The ship then was launched at last; and the author who had carried all that winter “ a knot in his forehead,” according to his watchful wife, “ came down with fire in his eyes, and walked about the room a different man.”

And yet Mr. Julian Hawthorne, who, as an author himself, cannot be ignorant what a sympathetic friend does for an author at such a moment, sees fit not merely to omit all direct reference to Mr. Fields in his book, but where he is obliged to allude to him as the “ publisher” (ii. 304) or “the editor” (ii. 311) makes no corresponding reference in his voluminous and careful index. To say that this is as if Lockhart’s Life of Scott had omitted the name of Constable or Ballantyne is to say nothing ; for the robust author of Waverley stood in no such need of publisher or editor as did Hawthorne. The qualities of this particular publisher were as well known to all Bostonians of his time as was his beaming and cordial personality ; and of all the pettinesses of Mr. Julian Hawthorne’s book, there is none so petty as this omission. For the sake of what can only be a personal grievance he has left a gap in his delineation; he has sacrificed the completeness of his work to what can be but an ungenerous whim. He has made an interesting and valuable book, for he happened to be the possessor of materials whose value could not be spoiled ; but it is one which gives a very inadequate view of the father, and will do no lasting credit to the son. So far as filial affection goes, his claim cannot be disputed ; but the quality is unfortunately shown in such a way as to confuse and becloud the serene memory of Hawthorne.