Home Life of Great Authors Part 16

"To attempt to explain and describe his career without taking this event into consideration would be like trying to imagine a sun without heat or a day without a sun. Nothing seems less likely than that he should have accomplished his work in literature independently of her sympathy and companions.h.i.+p. Not that she afforded him any direct and literal a.s.sistance in the composition of his books and stories: her gifts were wholly unsuited to such employment, and no one apprehended more keenly than she the solitariness and uniqueness of his genius, insomuch that she would have deemed it something not far removed from profanation to have offered to advise or sway him in regard to his literary productions. She believed in his inspiration, and her office was to promote, as far as in her lay, the favorableness of the conditions under which it should manifest itself."

It was to this that she devoted her life,--to comfort, to cheer, to soothe, to inspire, to guard from all outward annoyances, the poetical and sensitive man who believed in her so implicitly and leaned upon her so confidently. They led a very quiet and secluded life during the most of his literary career, and seemed almost to resent any intrusion of the outside world upon them, not only as regarded persons, but even as regarded agitating questions and pressing ideas.

They took very slight interest in the questions which stirred New England life in their day, and held entirely aloof from the reforms which shook the social life around them from centre to foundation-stone.

Indeed, he had a deep-seated dislike to the genus Reformer, and presented his picture of the whole race in "Hollingsworth." Perhaps he had known some individual reformer of that odious type, and out of this grew his dislike of the whole species. At any rate, the men--of whom New England was full at that time--who

"Blew the fiery breath of storm Through the hoa.r.s.e trumpet of Reform"

never received much aid or sympathy from Nathaniel Hawthorne or his wife. Nor will they, apparently, from his son, who says of his father, "He was not a teetotaler any more than he was an abolitionist or a Thug."

But if their sympathies did not go out very widely to the outside world, there was the most perfect sympathy and companions.h.i.+p in the home life, and no more beautiful record of a perfect marriage has ever been made than this life of the Hawthornes presents. Yes, it was a happy life they led, these two in their married isolation, despite poverty and obscurity and a lack of appreciation in the early time, and of trial, from ill-health and other causes, in later years. He lived like Carlyle, a good deal in the shadows of his famous books, and was sometimes for months in the possession of the demon of composition. While composing "The Marble Faun" he thus writes in a letter:

"I sternly shut myself up, and come to close grips with the romance which I am trying to tear from my brain."

He was always discouraged about his work, and needed a deal of cheering regarding it. He says in one place:

"My own individual taste is for an altogether different cla.s.s of books from what I write. If I were to meet with such books as mine by another writer, I do not believe I should be able to get through with them."

And again:--

"I will try to write a more genial book, but the Devil himself always gets into my inkstand, and I can only get him out by penfuls."

Still again:--

"Heaven sees fit to visit me with the unshakable conviction that all this series of articles is good for nothing. I don't think that the public will bear with much more of this sort of thing."

His letters are often full of this moody discouragement, though lighted up always by some gleams of his humor. For instance, he writes to Fields:--

"Do make some inquiries about Portugal,--in what part of the world it lies, and whether it is a Kingdom, an Empire, or a Republic.

Also the expenses of living there, and whether the Minister would be much pestered with his own countrymen."

And later, when he was in Rome:--

"I bitterly detest this Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it adieu forever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has ever happened to it from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site of it had been obliterated before I ever saw it."

His complaints about his pens are really very amusing to those people--and their name is legion--who have had a like difficulty in pleasing themselves. He writes to Fields:--

"If you want me to write you a good novel, send me a good pen; not a gold one, but one which will not get stiff and rheumatic the moment I get attached to it. I never met with a good pen in my life."

To this last sentiment we think that a great mult.i.tude which no man can number will respond Amen. He says of them again:--

"n.o.body ever suffered more from pens than I have, and I am glad that my labor with the abominable little tool is drawing to a close."

In private conversation he enlivened his more serious thoughts often with vivid surprises of expression; and he had a mild way of making a severe remark, which reminded Charlotte Cushman of a man she once saw making such a disturbance in the gallery of a theatre that the play could hardly proceed. Cries of "Throw him over!" arose from all parts of the house, and the noise became furious. All was tumultuous chaos until a sweet and gentle female voice was heard in the pit, when all grew silent to hear:--

"No, I pray you, my friends, don't throw him over. I beg that you will not throw him over, but--kill him where he is!"

It was only in the company of intimate personal friends, from whom all restraint was removed, that Hawthorne ever indulged in his natural buoyancy of spirits. Among them he occasionally condescended to uproarious fun. But he was like Dr. Johnson, who, when indulging in a scene of wild hilarity, suddenly exclaimed to his friends, as Beau Brummel approached, "Let us be grave; here comes a fool." If there was the slightest suspicion of there being a fool in the company Hawthorne always wore his armor. The pretentious and transcendental fools he hated worst of all; and the young man who had no taste for the finite, but thought the infinite was the thing for him, always left him with a feeling as of asphyxia.

Hawthorne's atmosphere was really unhealthy for transcendentalists. No doubt his dislike of Margaret Fuller arose from this feeling of his that she was always acting a part, always straining after an effect. He loved simple, natural, unaffected people, and the part of a sibyl was very distasteful to him. He suspected the inspiration of green tea in much that Margaret said, and very ungallantly p.r.o.nounced her a humbug. But as he did this only upon the paper of his own private diary, with no thought of it ever being paraded before a critical and captious world, we should not blame him too severely. And if he was mistaken in what he wrote concerning her husband and her life in Rome, as seems to be the fact, no doubt he was deceived by gossip-loving friends in Rome concerning the matter. One does not write gratuitous falsehoods upon the pages of one's private notebook about acquaintances, as a general rule.

If he had desired to injure Margaret he would have put his supposed facts in a different place, no doubt, and not merely written them in a moment of spleen where he never expected them to be seen.

The publication of such comment as this, and Carlyle's mention of Charles Lamb and others, seems to be due entirely to the total depravity of literary executors. As George Eliot says, it is like uncovering the dead Byron's club-foot, when he had been so sensitive about it through life, as his friend Trelawny boasts that he did. Margaret Fuller was a large-brained, big-hearted woman, but that she and Hawthorne could not thoroughly fraternize is not a strange thing. We see another instance of such lack of appreciation of each other's qualities in Henry James and the Bostonians of the present time. Even the admirers of the Boston type get a little quiet amus.e.m.e.nt from his delicious satire, although their admiration of the reformers may remain unshaken. That the world has got a little weary of the mutual admiration of the Boston coterie is an open secret. We have had a trifle too much of it from the day of Fields, who apparently invented Hawthorne, and would have put a patent upon him if possible, down to the present era of wors.h.i.+p of that real hero, Emerson who, if he survives the laudations of his present army of admirers, may well hope for immortality.

The wife of Hawthorne was so different a person from the n.o.ble army of literary and artistic women who are so numerous to-day, but who in his time had just begun to a.s.sert themselves, that, believing her to be the perfect flower of womanhood, as he did, he could scarcely be expected to appreciate the Zen.o.bias of that or of the present time.

Mrs. Hawthorne's sister, Elizabeth Peabody, was one of the women of the new era, and has spent her entire life in n.o.ble efforts to improve the world into which she was born; and who shall say whether Mrs. Hawthorne or Miss Peabody was the higher type of woman?

If we were obliged to compare Mrs. Hawthorne with the caricatures of the strong-minded woman in which novelists so delight,--those "housekeepers by the wrath of G.o.d,"--like Mrs. Jellaby and similar monstrosities, then the answer would not be hard. We could all cry, Mrs. Hawthorne, now and forever! But when we compare her to the strong-minded women like George Eliot, perfect wives, perfect home-makers, perfectly sympathetic and loyal comrades of their husbands, and lacking nothing of womanly softness or tenderness with all their strength, then the answer is not so simple. But doubtless the fact that G.o.d created both types may be accepted as evidence that He saw uses for both, and that even the women whom He made "fools to match the men" are not without their purpose in the economy of the universe.

Such thoughts as the following in regard to her husband, written by Mrs.

Hawthorne after eight years of marriage, sound not unlike the rhapsodies of George Eliot concerning Mr. Lewes:--

"He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any more than it is for a baby to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act, and a baby is not more unconscious of its innocence. I never knew such loftiness so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household matter any more than in the larger or more public ones. If the Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere their wings are very strong. Happy, happiest is the wife who can bear such and so sincere testimony to her husband after eight years' intimate union.

Such a person can never lose the prestige which commands and fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness, but in a kind of blissful confusion live on. If I can only be so great, so high, so n.o.ble, so sweet as he, in any phase of my being, I shall be glad. I am not deluded nor mistaken, as the angels know now, and as all my friends will know in open vision."

We will quote but this one pa.s.sage from her letters about him, though the Life is filled with similar ones, and will give but one of his love-letters to her, and that not entire. He says:--

"Sometimes during my solitary life in our old Salem house it seemed to me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive, for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm. But at length you were revealed to me in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own.

I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm, and renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have a heart; you only have thrown a light deep downward and upward into my soul. You only have revealed me to myself, for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow--to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. . . . If the whole world stood between us we must have met; if we had been born in different ages we could not have been sundered!"

What was poverty and obscurity and isolation unto these two souls, so complete in each other that nothing else was desired? How deep a lesson might the young of these later days, who hesitate to take each other unless all things else may be added unto them, learn from this perfect marriage! How much, too, could they learn from the dignity and the refinement and the charm of that early home, where all was so simple, so humble, and yet so rich and satisfying! Would that we had more such homes of royal poverty in these days of vulgar pretence and showy unreality. More homes where there is no shamefacedness over the want of the luxuries of their neighbors, but a simple content with what it is possible to have honorably; where plain living is a religion, and where there is no insatiable longing for the unattainable. The wors.h.i.+p of wealth, the feeling that there is no other good than money, is one of the most degrading features of our modern life. It is a falsehood, too.

There is everything good in the world, and the most of the things which are best in life can be had with but a little money. No man is poor unless he feels poor. If a family are willing to live their own n.o.ble life, pitched in a high key, and with little regard for what their neighbors may say and think, it is still possible to be happy in this goodly world, though the bank account may be small, or there be no bank account in the case. The Ways and Means Committee of which Mrs.

Hawthorne was chairman in her day could impart a world of wisdom to the fretful and ambitious wives of a generation of young men now upon the stage of action, who strive so hard to live like the people who have wealth at their command that they spoil the beautiful homes they might enjoy by an unceasing strife to appear to live better than they can afford to do.

When Fortune began to smile upon the Hawthornes, after the immortal "Scarlet Letter" had been written and "The Blithedale Romance" had been added to it, they received her favors with thankful hearts, and knew how to spend wisely and well what came to them. But, as so often happens, it does not appear that they were any happier in their easier circ.u.mstances than in their poverty; probably not as happy, for the glamour of youth was gone, and the first zest of being had become dulled. Ill health, too, had come upon him, once so strong and perfect in body; and their home was measurably broken up after they first went abroad. The days at the Old Manse comprised the idyl of their lives.

Here is what Hawthorne himself says of this time:--

"My wife is in the strictest sense my sole companion, and I need no other; there is no vacancy in my mind any more than in my heart. In truth, I have spent so many years in total seclusion from all human society that it is no wonder if now I feel all my desires satisfied by this sole intercourse. But she has come to me from the midst of many friends and acquaintances; yet she lives from day to day in this solitude, seeing n.o.body but myself and our Molly, while the snow of our avenue is untrodden for weeks by any footstep save mine. Yet she is always cheerful. Thank G.o.d that I suffice for her boundless heart."

And, again, to her he writes:--

"DEAR LITTLE WIFE,--After finis.h.i.+ng my record in the journal, I sat a long time in grandmother's chair thinking of many things; but the thought of thee, the great thought of thee, was among all other thoughts, like the pervading suns.h.i.+ne falling through the boughs and branches of a tree and tinging every separate leaf. And surely thou shouldst not have deserted me without manufacturing a sufficient quant.i.ty of suns.h.i.+ne to last till thy return. Art thou not ashamed?"

Concord was never the same to them after their return from Rome. The shadow of the coming separation was already around them. He writes, after the appearance of Longfellow's poem: "I, too, am weary, and look forward to the Wayside Inn." And, spite of the most loving ministrations of family and friends, he was soon brought to the rest which awaited him there. None could really regret that he had found the peace he sought; but the world seemed more thinly populated when it was known that the hand which had written "The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," and "The Marble Faun" would write no more. "We carried him,"

said Fields, "through the blossoming orchards of Concord, and laid him down under a group of pines on a hill-side overlooking historic fields; the unfinished romance which had cost him such anxiety laid upon his coffin." And there, upon that Concord height which he has rendered world-famous, made a Delphian vale or a Mecca to so many pilgrims from his own land and from over sea, he sleeps well. There the sweet spring flowers of dear old New England bloom for him; there the Mayflower pierces the melting snow, and the shy, sweet violet gems the earliest green; there the dandelion glows in golden splendor, and the snowy daisies star the gra.s.s, and all the sweet succession of summer flowers troop in orderly array, until Autumn waves her torch, and the sumach and the goldenrod blaze out in wild magnificence, and the blue-fringed gentian hides in secret coverts. These are the fitting decorations of that grave. Piled marble or towering granite would lie too heavy on the heart of this child of Nature. And as the years shall pa.s.s, still will the humble grave continue to be visited. "Forgotten" will never be written upon the tombstone of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Still through the clear brilliance of New England winter nights will the stars look down tenderly upon it. Arcturus will stand guard over it, golden-belted Orion will send down quivering lances of light to illumine it, the pomp of blazing Jupiter shall envelop it, and the first radiance of the dawn shall silver its sacred slopes forever.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

HENRY W. LONGFELLOW.