A Daughter of Hawthorne
I
MY sister Rose, last-born of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s three children, lived seventy-five years; nearly two thirds of that span passed in the seclusion of her own family; the remainder, emerging to unsought distinction in the love and honor of many. The latter part of such a career arouses interest in its beginnings; and, since I am now the only surviving person qualified to portray her earlier phase, I feel myself under a certain obligation to attempt this sketch of my sister’s infancy and girlhood.
No one familiar with her as a girl could have foreseen what her maturity was to be; the change was abrupt and strange. Conditions for the departure were no doubt present, but hidden — even perhaps from herself. Yet her close may have revealed her true nature more accurately than did her youth: the chemistry of growth is occult.
She was born in May 1851, in Lenox, on the Berkshire hills: a child of Spring, and Spring never perished from her nature. She was hearty, vigorous, and impetuous, blue-eyed and rosy, with the auburn hair of that temperament. ‘A bright and healthy child,’ wrote her father, two months after her birth, ‘and neither more nor less handsome than babies generally are. I think I feel more interested in her than I did in the other children at the same age, from the consideration that she is to be the daughter of my age — the comfort (at least so it is to be hoped) of my declining years.’ He was forty-seven, and was to die when Rose was in her thirteenth year.
She took her stand at once as a personage of dignity and importance: she was aggressive, quick-tempered, joyous, and confident. A breeze of purpose went with her; she was passionately affectionate, but independent; imperious, but generous. Her disappointments and indignations were frequent, but she could never be long dejected; she felt the richness of the world, and her thirst for high adventure would not be balked. She saw love in the faces of those about her, and supposed that earth and air were made of nothing else, and that it was her birthright.
She came at a happy hour of the family fortunes, after The Scarlet Letter had made its mark and the drab life in Salem could be exchanged for the freedom of the hills. Rose’s petals expanded in the breezy sunshine; sky, mountain, lake, and forest were her familiars; good angels had been her godmothers. Her father, in a happy vein, forthwith wrote The Wonder-Book and Tanglewood Tales; and all went well. After two years the family removed to Concord, and thence to England, where, and on the Continent, seven more years were to pass. Rose at fourteen, though never outside the family circle, had seen more of the world than had most of her age—England, France, Italy, Portugal, and Madeira; had even, at Lisbon, had the entrée of the little Portuguese Court there, and had stamped her foot when an attaché had failed to comprehend her orders, and shouted, with flashing eyes, ‘Understandey?' The princess rôle suited her very well.
But she was only five years old then. Later she felt the mightiness of London and the exhilaration of Paris; and in Rome and Florence she gamboled in the Coliseum and the Palace of the Cæsars, picked up treasure-trove in the Forum, found green lizards for her brother, who was her constant companion at the time, and was making a natural-history collection. They climbed over the ruins of twenty centuries, and walked over the Campagna on the broad pavements on which Roman armies had tramped homeward from their victories. On rainy days they would visit the sculptures and pictures of the Vatican, or stroll about the vast jeweled spaces of the great Church, observing the mystic performances of the priests before the altars and listening to the enchanted music that wove invisible patterns in the upper air. Especially interesting were the confessionals, little booths set up here and there, into which would enter tortured sinners, emerging after a time with brightened faces and lightened steps. And the priest, wiping his shaved brow, would glance after them with a placid smile: one more reverse for the enemy of mankind! My sister and I never discussed religion; we were in a state of holy awe on the subject; and, though we had gathered the impression that the Roman Catholics were somehow in error, we did n’t know why, and were affected by the warm splendor of their performances.
Rose, I think, was less touched by form than by color, and the long array of antique sculpture in the Vatican did not hold her as it did her companion, though she ' liked ’ the great Apollo, his patrician air of beautiful disdain. The child was an innate patrician; seemed to have a private understanding with royalty; had a sympathetic enjoyment of high ceremonies, and was extremely fastidious in her tastes. Ugliness, dirt, disharmony, revolted her, and she averted herself from them with a haughty disgust. In view of her after career, this trait of hers must be emphasized.
II
Her father was an imaginative writer, her mother an artist, and Rose inherited creative ardor, but lacked the ability to give her aspirations satisfactory projection. She painted, she wrote, she played the piano and sang; but the restraint of rules was irksome to her in all things. Her conceptions, as Browning might say, broke through language and escaped; in all her girlish products there were an impassioned surge and exaltation, the purpose flagrant, but the rendering obscure. The gift of expression in art, much as she could appreciate it in others, was beyond her own control. Something else was needed to satisfy her soul and release her energies. She was to be a woman grown before the solution to her riddle appeared.
She did not find it in society; she was very critical of others, and would endow this or that person with virtues which they lacked or with faults of which they were innocent; vehemently repenting, afterward, her errors of judgment, but prone as ever to repeat them. She had no girl confidantes; and, in spite of her beauty and charm, she disturbed rather than won her male acquaintance. She might drape them in imaginative glories, or condemn them unheard and misunderstood; the ground failed beneath their feet and they were fain to retire, mystified; there would be no enlightenment on her part. One might almost say that she never really met people at all, for all her impersonal cordiality and resource. If she ever had a love affair, it was in some region of the imagination beyond the scope of daily life. She could have been a queen of love; but she bandaged her eyes with rainbows and could not see realities. She was prone to pregnant silences when others were chatting, but her eyes would speak. She took more from her father than from her mother.
The freedom and scope of natural scenery and things delighted her; here were a beauty and breadth not subject to criticism; they afforded space for her ideals. During our stay at English Leamington, one spring, she and her brother would walk up an acclivity, a mile or two outside the town, where grass and foliage were profuse and free as when Chaucer sang, and there were hedges of hawthorn bordering the rustic paths. We gathered armfuls of the thick-growing red and white blooms, and Rose would carry them home through the sober streets, her rosy face smiling through the clusters.
Imagination so possessed her that in her childhood she mistook its creations for facts, and would come out of her retirements with marvelous tales of what she had seen and adventured; her wise father and mother were too wise to insist upon discrepancies between truth and fable. During our sojourn at the haunted castle of Montauto, outside Florence, Rose and her companion loved to wander through the great empty rooms, with their dim lights and soft shadows, listening for secret sounds and seeing gliding figures. In the podere — the estate appertaining to the house — we would wander hand in hand among the vines and fig trees, fauns and nymphs treading soundlessly at our side. If we recognized our own make-believe, it only added to the charm. The credulities of childhood may bear good fruit in later years.
On a visit to her free hospital sixty years after this, I recalled to her these child experiences. She sat on the wooden verandah of her house of love and charity, the clear American sunshine falling upon her: a devout Catholic, a band of white folded across her forehead, black robes falling about her in long folds, a rosary on her breast. Her cheeks were still rosy and her eyes blue, her lips tender and resolute. ‘I was chasing will-o’-the-wisps in those days,’ she said, with a smile and a sigh. If it were a sin, her father-confessor would gently have absolved her. Her mother supplied his rôle in the early years; when Rose had done wrong, she was not rebuked, but her mother would draw her into seclusion, leading her, in silence, into contemplation of the Good and True, until the barriers would give way and tears came forth. The Lord of Heaven Himself might look through the mother’s face in those moments.
In Concord, in her teens, she did not attend Sanborn’s famous boys’ and girls’ school; and the decline and death of our father ended her childhood, and left her perplexed and taciturn. She had never before faced irreparable loss and grief, and deep emotion, in her, had not learned how to give or to receive sympathy; and religious consolations seemed, perhaps, too conventional for her need. We cannot lift the veils that cover these human withdrawals. Her abounding health and energy, incongruous with her spiritual mood, puzzled her; soul and body were at odds. The music, dancing, and lighthearted chatter of the Concord young people discomposed her sense of social values; she would be present at their merrymakings, but without hearty merriment; the feelings that really dominated her were incommunicable.
By a fortunate chance, Dio Lewis’s seminary for young ladies was opened in Lexington (neighboring Concord) at about this time, and Rose and her sister Una went there. It was, really, a school of physical exercise, according to Lewis’s system, affording young women their first opportunity in this country to cultivate their bodies and live by rules of health. Only young ‘ladies’ were admitted; all went well; a delightful and wholesome organization was created. The girls wore a distinctive dress suitable for outdoor hikes and sports; they prospered greatly and were happy; it was a remarkable anticipation of a freer age. Una and Rose were greatly benefited, and Lewis made a small fortune; but after two years the big old frame building which housed them (it had been a hotel) burned to the ground; it was never rebuilt, and for fifty years the physical education of American young women was allowed to lapse. Mrs. Hawthorne, with her three children, removed to Dresden, in Saxony, and a new era began, by the end of which Rose had entered her twentieth year.
In the German city things wore a more practical aspect; the American and English society in these foreign places felt more freedom than at home; there were good music, good pictures, pleasant outdoor life, open-air concerts in the Grosser Garten and Sächsische Schweiz, hard by. Rose began to understand the society idea; but before three years the Franco-Prussian War took me to New York and the mother and daughters to London, where they were to meet the Brownings and other old friends — an agreeable interlude, until the mother’s final illness began, the gravity of which I did not realize until a cablegram told me she was dead. A young fellow whom we had known in Dresden happened to be about leaving for London, and would escort the two girls back to America; but, after what seemed a very brief interval, a short letter from him informed me that he and Rose had become man and wife.
III
George Lathrop was even younger than his wife; neither of them was yet twenty years old. But the episode does not belong to the theme I am here treating; it was an error, not to be repaired. Its significance here is in the fact that it obliterated whatever dreams of a happy marriage state Rose might have had (based upon the flawless felicity of her father’s and mother’s union), awakening her, instead, to the rôle of endurance, difficult for her temperament of buoyant independence. Pride helped her, and her native habit of reticence in vital matters. Not until some twenty years later did she become a widow; a son had died in infancy.
Strong natures are perfected by strong measures. Rose was relentlessly tested. Beautiful, gifted, impetuous, imperious, and fastidious, the way to perversity was broad before her. Her friends were overprone to indulge and defer to her, and generous impulse could not protect her from selfishness. She might have made a brilliant figure before the world, but the heights above the world are reached by suffering.
Midway on their path, these young people were converted to Catholicism, surprising their friends even more than by their marriage — a daughter of the Puritans to embrace the faith preeminent for church authority, which had driven the Pilgrims to New England! Rose herself believed that the leaven had long been working in her, and that her childish experience in Rome had given hints of what was to come. We often interpret our present by our past. Her zeal was great; she had found a way to use her highest energies. But some few years were yet to pass before she found the means for the total self-surrender and devotion which were indispensable. Her first step was to seek a nurse’s certificate in a hospital. There she worked for a year, overcoming all the obstacles and tests which are designed to prove to the utmost the sincerity and constancy of the applicant. With the winning of her diploma, her future was in her hands. She knew the stories of the saints and martyrs of the Church, and nothing less than the extreme would satisfy her thirst for self-sacrifice. Whatever was most abhorrent to the instincts of the flesh, that must she embrace; whatever was most hopeless and forlorn in human fate, that must she love and assuage. All that had given joy in her life must be banished for the sake of a purer joy. In no figurative sense, but literally, must she accept the stern injunction, ‘Sell that thou hast, and give to the poor . . . and follow me!’
She did not beguile herself with ecstatic emotions; she realized what she did; she had abundant common sense. But she was resolved that her regeneration should be unfaltering and permanent. Nor would she seek the solace of mortal sympathy, but would pass through her fires, like the martyrs of the Church before her, with humility and cheerfulness. How be other than cheerful, since the indulgences of earth become a stench in the nostrils, but the fragrance of Heaven is immortal ? She held no pose of sanctity, but was a plain working woman, diligent and faithful in the duties she had undertaken. Work, in increasing measure, was always to do, and she did it to the very end.
No other disease is more painful or repulsive than cancer, more hideous to see or torturing to endure. When the sufferer’s poverty prevents him from commanding medical care and leaves him to perish unattended, human misery can hardly go further. Rose’s plan was simple: she would attend those only who were paupers and had been given up as hopeless cases by the doctors. They came to her, not to be healed, but to die. But till death came they received every attention and tenderness that love and skill could give, and breathed an atmosphere of human love, to many of them an experience without precedent. Rose had a little money of her own, and she spent it in renting a floor of a building in the slums of east New York and supplying it with cots; she could not pay for help, and at first she worked alone. By and by another young woman visited her, and became her voluntary assistant and her friend. Other persons, learning of the strange enterprise, made occasional contributions. Presently she was able to enlarge the accommodations and to care for more patients. As time went on, other unselfish helpers came, but not all found courage to remain. The enterprise, too, teetering continually on the brink of collapse for lack of means to carry it on, seemed to survive by miracle only; but always, even at the last moment, money would be sent it from unknown sources to supply the desperate need; the workers prayed, and their prayers were answered — they could assign no other reason, and they held faith in the efficacy of prayer. But by slow degrees the almost incredible fact of the hospital became known to one and another, and, personally confirmed, the supplies became larger and more frequent. A larger building was rented, and at last it became practicable to acquire a refuge for the moribund paupers, in an airy and wholesome New York suburb; more recently it has been redesigned and constructed on a broader plan. Long before this the Mother Church had taken cognizance of the Home, and a date was appointed for the formal consecration. Rose looked forward with joy to this consummation of her hopes; but when, one night, she had composed herself to happy sleep, she did not awaken the next morning when the Sisters came to call her. Mother Alphonsa was gone; but she had lived long enough to see her work well done, and promising to endure, perhaps, as long as the need which it relieved.
IV
Circumstances took me far from her neighborhood in the latter years of her life; I could visit her but at long intervals. It happened usually in spring, cool sunshine falling on the porch we sat in; and our talk was not about the Home, nor about her joining the Church; and but once or twice did she lead me through the wards, perhaps wishing to spare me even a sight of what monopolized her whole existence. But we chatted of old times, and of the children who had arisen in our later age, whom she ardently loved, and who loved her. Once she gave me some little books of the Lives of the Saints; and once, when I was departing for India, to investigate the plague and famine there, she put about my neck a tiny metal effigy which had, she said, been blessed by the Holy Father, and would shield me from harm.
Upon the whole, I found her, in this later phase, naïve and childlike, like the little girl who had been my playmate, but with a difference. The passions of her nature, doubtless as urgent as ever, centred no longer round her personal fate and interests, for in her own view she no longer existed. She lived, labored, and prayed only for those incarnations of mortal misery which she had drawn about her. Formerly she looked forward to the splendid carnival of human life, to a career in art, in society, to a bountiful and happy marriage. Those aspirations had been uprooted like weeds in a garden, and she had planted in their place flowers of deathless root: the lights of Carnival were quenched in the dawn of a purer festival. As she sat before me in her black robes, she was not sad to look at; cheerfulness emanated from her like a fragrance, as I remember it in her mother; and, like her, she was lowvoiced, tranquil, and fearless. As with her father, too, her face would now7 and again be traversed by lights and shades of eloquent thought and feeling. But within all was the vivid, innocent sister who had been my companion long ago.
Does it seem a pity that a nature so finely organized to give pleasure to the world and to receive it should willfully confine itself to such as were poorest and most barren of human creatures? Is it not better to establish and illustrate the beauty of the life of the world than, for such an alternative, to turn one’s back upon it?
Persons competent to answer such questions must needs do so in terms which to us are incomprehensible. They have learned, at a price, things which we do not know. They have felt a joy and seen a beauty in whose existence we are impotent to believe; and for the least of these, having once tasted them, they would not exchange the kingdoms and the glory of all the earth. Such divine beauty and joy are all about us, always; but we cannot be aware of them, for, though the veil be transparent, our eyes are blind.
The seers, on the other hand, are shy and humble, and stammer and retire when interrogated. They are not proud of their knowledge, but feel themselves to be the very paupers of Creation. ‘What am I in the pure and lovely light of the Holiness of God?' It is vain to argue with such persons; but, if you examine them narrowly, you may find upon their hands and feet the marks of the nails.