The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne Part 5

"Thus has this man, who would be considered a Maecenas, taken from a penniless writer material incomparably better than any his own brain can supply." [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 68, 69.]

Whether this New York periodical was the _Knickerbocker_ or some other, we are not informed; neither do we know what Bridge replied to Hawthorne, who had closed his letter with a malediction, on the aforesaid editor, but elsewhere in his memoirs he remarks:

"Hawthorne received but small compensation for any of this literary work, for he lacked the knowledge of business and the self-a.s.sertion necessary to obtain even the moderate remuneration vouchsafed to writers fifty years ago." [Footnote: Horatio Bridge, 77.]

If Horatio Bridge had been an author himself, he would not have written this statement concerning his friend. Magazine editors are like men in other professions: some of them are honorable and others are less so; but an author who offers a ma.n.u.script to the editor of a magazine is wholly at his mercy, so far as that small piece of property is concerned. The author cannot make a bargain with the editor as he can with the publisher of his book, and is obliged to accept whatever the latter chooses to give him. Instances have been known where an editor has destroyed a valuable ma.n.u.script, without compensation or explanation of any kind. Hawthorne was doing the best that a human being could under the conditions that were given him. Above all things, he was true to himself; no man could be more so.

Yet Bridge wrote to him on Christmas Day, 1836:

"The bane of your life has been self-distrust. This has kept you back for many years; which, if you had improved by publis.h.i.+ng, would long ago have given you what you must now wait a long time for. It may be for the best, but I doubt it."

Nothing is more trying in misfortune than the ill-judged advice of well-meaning friends. There is no nettle that stings like it. To expect Hawthorne to become a literary genius, and at the same time to develop the peculiar faculties of a commercial traveller or a curb-stone broker, was unreasonable. In the phraseology of Sir William Hamilton, the two vocations are "non-compossible." Bridge himself was undertaking a grandly unpractical project about this time: nothing less than an attempt to dam the Androscoggin, a river liable to devastating floods; and in this enterprise he was obliged to trust to a cla.s.s of men who were much more uncertain in their ways and methods than those with whom Hawthorne dealt. Horatio Bridge had not studied civil engineering, and the result was that before two years had elapsed the floods on the Androscoggin swept the dam away, and his fortune with it.

In the same letter we also notice this paragraph concerning another Bowdoin friend:

"And so Frank Pierce is elected Senator. There is an instance of what a man can do by trying. With no very remarkable talents, he at the age of thirty-four fills one of the highest stations in the nation. He is a good fellow, and I rejoice at his success." [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i.

148.]

Pierce certainly possessed the cap of Fortunatus, and it seems as if there must have been some magic faculty in the man, which enabled him to win high positions so easily; and he continued to do this, although he had not distinguished himself particularly as a member of Congress, and he appeared to still less advantage among the great party leaders in the United States Senate. He ill.u.s.trated the faculty for "getting elected."

In October, 1836, the time arrived for settling the matrimonial wager between Hawthorne and Jonathan Cilley, which they had made at college twelve years before. Bridge accordingly examined the doc.u.ments which they had deposited with him, and notified Cilley that he was under obligation to provide Hawthorne with an octavo of Madeira.

Cilley's letter to Hawthorne on this occasion does not impress one favorably. [Footnote: J. Hawthorne, i. 144.] It is familiar and jocose, without being either witty or friendly, and he gives no intimation in it of an intention to fulfil his promise. Hawthorne appears to have sent the letter to Bridge, who replied:

"I doubt whether you ever get your wine from Cilley. His inquiring of you whether he had really lost the bet is suspicious; and he has written me in a manner inconsistent with an intention of paying promptly; and if a bet grows old it grows cold. He wished me to propose to you to have it paid at Brunswick next Commencement, and to have as many of our cla.s.smates as could be mustered to drink it. It may be Cilley's idea to pay over the balance after taking a strong pull at it; if so, it is well enough. But still it should be tendered within the month."

In short, Cilley behaved in this matter much in the style of a tricky Van Buren politician, making a great bl.u.s.ter of words, and privately intending to do nothing. He was running for Congress at the time on the Van Buren ticket, and it is quite likely that the expenses of the campaign had exhausted his funds. That he should never have paid the bet was less to Hawthorne's disadvantage than his own.

It was now that Horatio Bridge proved himself a true friend, and equally a man. In the spring of 1836 Goodrich had obtained for Hawthorne the editors.h.i.+p of the _American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge_, with a salary of five hundred dollars; [Footnote: Conway, 45.]but he soon discovered that he had embarked on a s.h.i.+p with a rotten hulk. He started off heroically, writing the whole of the first number with the help of his sister Elizabeth; but by midsummer the concern was bankrupt, and he retired to his lonely cell, more gloomy and despondent than before. There are few sadder spectacles then that of a man seeking work without being able to obtain it; and this applies to the man of genius as well as to the day laborer.

Horatio Bridge now realized that the time had come for him to interfere.

He recognized that Hawthorne was gradually lapsing into a hypochondria that might terminate fatally; that he was Goethe's oak planted in a flowerpot, and that unless the flower-pot could be broken, the oak would die. He also saw that Hawthorne would never receive the public recognition that was due to his ability, so long as he published magazine articles under an a.s.sumed name. He accordingly wrote to Goodrich--fortunately before his mill-dam gave way--suggesting the publication of a volume of Hawthorne's stories, and offered to guarantee the publisher against loss. This proposition was readily accepted, but Bridge might have made a much better bargain. What it amounted to was, the half-profit system without the half-profit. The necessary papers were exchanged and Hawthorne gladly acceded to Goodrich's terms. Bridge, however, had cautioned Goodrich not to inform Hawthorne of his share in the enterprise, and the consequence of this was that he shortly received a letter from Hawthorne, informing him of the good news--which he knew already--and praising Goodrich, to whom he proposed to dedicate his new volume. Bridge's generosity had come back to him, dried and salted,--as it has to many another.

What could Bridge do, in the premises? Goodrich had written to Hawthorne that the publisher, Mr. Howes, was confident of making a favorable arrangement _with a man of capital who would edit the book_; but Bridge did not know this, and he suspected Goodrich of sailing into Hawthorne's favor under a false flag. He therefore wrote to Hawthorne, November 17, 1836:

"I fear you will hurt yourself by puffing Goodrich _undeservedly_,--for there is no doubt in my mind of his selfishness in regard to your work and yourself. I am perfectly aware that he has taken a good deal of interest in you, but when did he ever do anything for you without a _quid pro quo_? The magazine was given to you for $100 less than it should have been. The _Token_ was saved by your writing. Unless you are already committed, do not mar the prospects of your _first_ book by hoisting Goodrich into favor."

This prevented the dedication, for which Hawthorne was afterward thankful enough. The book, which was the first volume of "Twice Told Tales" came from the press the following spring, and proved an immediate success, although not a highly lucrative one for its author. With the help of Longfellow's cordial review of it in the _North American_ it established Hawthorne's reputation on a firm and irrefragable basis.

All honor to Horatio.

As if Hawthorne had not seen a sufficiently long "winter of discontent"

already, his friends now proposed to obtain the position of secretary and chronicler for him on Commodore Jones's exploring expedition to the South Pole! Franklin Pierce was the first to think of this, but Bridge interceded with Cilley to give it his support, and there can be no doubt that they would have succeeded in obtaining the position for Hawthorne, but the expedition itself failed, for lack of a Congressional appropriation. The following year, 1838, the project was again brought forward by the administration, and Congress being in a more amiable frame of mind granted the requisite funds; but Hawthorne had now contracted new ties in his native city, bound, as it were, by an inseparable cord stronger than a Manila hawser, and Doctor Nathaniel Peabody's hospitable parlors were more attractive to him than anything the Antarctic regions could offer.

We have now entered upon the period where Hawthorne's own diary commences, the autobiography of a pure-minded, closely observing man; an invaluable record, which began apparently in 1835, and was continued nearly until the close of his life; now published in a succession of American, English and Italian note-books. In it we find records of what he saw and thought; descriptive pa.s.sages, afterward made serviceable in his works of fiction, and perhaps written with that object in view; fanciful notions, jotted down on the impulse of the moment; records of his social life; but little critical writing or personal confessions,--although the latter may have been reserved; from publication by his different editors. It is known that much of his diary has not yet been given to the public, and perhaps never will be.

In July, 1837, Hawthorne went to Augusta, to spend a month with his friend Horatio Bridge; went fis.h.i.+ng with him, for what they called white perch, probably the saibling; [Footnote: The American saibling, or golden trout, is only indigenous to Lake Sunapee, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and to a small lake near Augusta.] and was greatly entertained with the peculiarities of an idiomatic Frenchman, an itinerant teacher of that language, whom Bridge, in the kindness of his heart, had taken into his own house. The last of July, Cilley also made his appearance, but did not bring the Madeira with him, and Hawthorne has left this rather critical portrait of him in his diary:

"Friday, July 28th.--Saw my cla.s.smate and formerly intimate friend, ----, for the first time since we graduated. He has met with good success in life, in spite of circ.u.mstances, having struggled upward against bitter opposition, by the force of his abilities, to be a member of Congress, after having been for some time the leader of his party in the State Legislature. We met like old friends, and conversed almost as freely as we used to do in college days, twelve years ago and more. He is a singular person, shrewd, crafty, insinuating, with wonderful tact, seizing on each man by his manageable point, and using him for his own purpose, often without the man's suspecting that he is made a tool of; and yet, artificial as his character would seem to be, his conversation, at least to myself, was full of natural feeling, the expression of which can hardly be mistaken, and his revelations with regard to himself had really a great deal of frankness. A man of the most open nature might well have been more reserved to a friend, after twelve years separation, than ---- was to me. Nevertheless, he is really a crafty man, concealing, like a murder-secret, anything that it is not good for him to have known. He by no means feigns the good feeling that he professes, nor is there anything affected in the frankness of his conversation; and it is this that makes him so fascinating. There is such a quant.i.ty of truth and kindliness and warm affections, that a man's heart opens to him, in spite of himself. He deceives by truth. And not only is he crafty, but, when occasion demands, bold and fierce like a tiger, determined, and even straightforward and undisguised in his measures,--a daring fellow as well as a sly one."

This can be no other than Jonathan Cilley; like many of his cla.s.s, a man of great good humor but not over-scrupulous, so far as the means he might make use of were concerned. He did not, however, prove to be as skilful a diplomat as Hawthorne seems to have supposed him. The duel between Cilley and Graves, of Kentucky, has been so variously misrepresented that the present occasion would seem a fitting opportunity to tell the plain truth concerning it.

President Jackson was an honest man, in the customary sense of the term, and he would have scorned to take a dollar that was not his own; but he suffered greatly from parasites, who pilfered the nation's money,--the natural consequence of the spoils-of-office system. The exposure of these peculations gave the Whigs a decided advantage, and Cilley, who had quickly proved his ability in debate, attempted to set a back-fire by accusing Watson Webb, the editor of the _Courier and Enquirer_, of having been bribed to change the politics of his paper. The true facts of the case were, that the paper had been purchased by the Whigs, and Webb, of course, had a right to change his politics if he chose to; and the net result of Cilley's attack was a challenge to mortal combat, carried by Representative Graves, of Kentucky. Cilley, although a man of courage, declined this, on the ground that members of Congress ought not to be called to account outside of the Capitol, for words spoken in debate. "Then," said Graves, "you will at least admit that my friend is a gentleman."

This was a fair offer toward conciliation, and if Cilley had been peaceably inclined he would certainly have accepted it; but he obstinately refused to acknowledge that General Webb was a gentleman, and in consequence of this he received a second challenge the next day from Graves, brought by Henry A. Wise, afterward Governor of Virginia.

Cilley still objected to fighting, but members of his party urged him into it: the duel took place, and Cilley was killed.

It may be said in favor of the "code of honor" that it discourages blackguardism and instructs a man to keep a civil tongue; but it is not always possible to prevent outbursts of temper, especially in hot climates, and a man's wife and children should also be considered.

Andrew Jackson said at the close of his life, that there was nothing he regretted so much as having killed a human being in a duel. Man rises by humility, and angels fall from pride.

Hawthorne wrote a kindly and regretful notice of the death of his old acquaintance, which was published in the _Democratic Review_, and which closed with this significant pa.s.sage:

"Alas, that over the grave of a dear friend, my sorrow for the bereavement must be mingled with another grief--that he threw away such a life in so miserable a cause! Why, as he was true to the Northern character in all things else, did he swerve from his Northern principles in this final scene?" [Footnote: Conway, 63.]

It will be well to bear this in mind in connection with a somewhat similar incident, which we have now to consider.

An anecdote has been repeated in all the books about Hawthorne published since 1880, which would do him little credit if it could be proved,--a story that he challenged one of his friends to a duel, at the instigation of a vulgar and unprincipled young woman. Horatio Bridge says in reference to it:

"This characteristic was notably displayed several years later, when a lady incited him to quarrel with one of his best friends on account of a groundless pique of hers. He went to Was.h.i.+ngton for the purpose of challenging the gentleman, and it was only after ample explanation had been made, showing that his friend had behaved with entire honor, that Pierce and Cilley, who were his advisers, could persuade him to be satisfied without a fight." [Footnote: Bridge, 5.]

How the good Horatio could have fallen into this pit is unimaginable, for a double contradiction is contained in his statement. "Some time after this," that is after leaving college, would give the impression that the affair took place about 1830, whereas Pierce and Cilley were not in Was.h.i.+ngton together till five or six years later--probably seven years later. Moreover, Hawthorne states in a letter to Pierce's friend O'Sullivan, on April 1, 1853, that he had never been in Was.h.i.+ngton up to that time. The Manning family and Mrs. Hawthorne's relatives never heard of the story previous to its publication.

The internal evidence is equally strong against it. What New England girl would behave in the manner that Hawthorne's son represents this one to have done? What young gentleman would have listened to such a communication as he supposes, and especially the reserved and modest Hawthorne? One can even imagine the aspect of horror on his face at such an unlady-like proceeding. The story would be an ignominious one for Hawthorne, if it were credible, but there is no occasion for our believing it until some tangible evidence is adduced in its support.

There was no element of Quixotism in his composition, and it is quite as impossible to locate the ident.i.ty of the person whom Hawthorne is supposed to have challenged.

CHAPTER V

EOS AND EROS: 1835-1839

It was fortunate for Hawthorne that there was at this time a periodical in the United States, the _North American Review_, which was generally looked upon as an authority in literature, and which in most instances deserved the confidence that was placed in it, for its reviews were written by men of distinguished ability. It was the _North American Review_ which made the reputation of L. Maria Child, and which enrolled Hawthorne in the order of geniuses.

There is not much literary criticism in Longfellow's review, and he does not "rise to the level of the accomplished essayist" of our own time, [Footnote: Who writes so correctly and says so little to the purpose.]

but he goes to the main point with the single-mindness of the true poet. "A new star," he says, "has appeared in the skies"--a veritable prediction. "Others will gaze at it with telescopes, and decide whether it is in the constellation of Orion or the Great Bear. It is enough for us to gaze at it, to admire it, and welcome it."

"Although Hawthorne writes in prose, he belongs among the poets. To every subject he touches he gives a poetic personality which emanates from the man himself. His sympathies extend to all things living, and even to the inanimates. Another characteristic is the exceeding beauty of his style. It is as clear as running waters are. Indeed he uses words as mere stepping-stones, upon which, with a free and youthful bound, his spirit crosses and re-crosses the bright and rus.h.i.+ng stream of thought."

Again he says:

"A calm, thoughtful face seems to be looking at you from every page; with now a pleasant smile, and now a shade of sadness stealing over its features. Sometimes, though not often, it glares wildly at you, with a strange and painful expression, as, in the German romance, the bronze knocker of the Archivarius Lindhorst makes up faces at the Student Anselmus."

Here we have a portrait of Hawthorne, by one who knew him, in a few simple words; and behind a calm thoughtful face there is that mysterious unknown quant.i.ty which puzzles Longfellow here, and always perplexed Hawthorne's friends. It may have been the nucleus or tap-root of his genius.

Longfellow seems to have felt it as a dividing line between them. He probably felt so at college; and this brings us back to an old subject.

Hawthorne's superiority to Longfellow as an artist consisted essentially in this, that he was never an optimist. Puritanism looked upon human nature with a hostile eye, and was inclined to see evil in it where none existed; and Doctor Channing, who inaugurated the great moral movement which swept Puritanism away in this country, tended, as all reformers do, to the opposite extreme,--to that scepticism of evil which, as George Brandes says, is greatly to the advantage of hypocrites and sharpers. This was justifiable in Doctor Channing, but among his followers it has often degenerated into an inverted or h.o.m.oeopathic kind of Puritanism,--a habit of excusing the faults of others, or of themselves, on the score of good intentions--a habit of self-justification, and even to the perverse belief that, as everything is for the best, whatever we do in this world must be for good. To this cla.s.s of sentimentalists the most serious evil is truth-seeing and truth-speaking. It is an excellent plan to look upon the bright side of things, but one should not do this to the extent of blinding oneself to facts. Doctor Johnson once said to Boswell, "Beware, my friend, of mixing up virtue and vice;" but there is something worse than that, and it is, to stigmatize a writer as a pessimist or a hypochondriac for refusing to take rainbow-colored views. This, however, would never apply to Longfellow.

Hawthorne, with his eye ever on the mark, pursued a middle course. He separated himself from the Puritans without joining their opponents, and thus attained the most independent stand-point of any American writer of his time; and if this alienated him from the various humanitarian movements that were going forward, it was nevertheless a decided advantage for the work he was intended to do. In this respect he resembled Scott, Thackeray and George Eliot.