The Complete Short Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne: 120+ Titles in One Edition (Illustrated Edition). Nathaniel Hawthorne
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looked up with a dawning smile, a bright, expectant glance,—holding the book on his knee meanwhile, with a finger in the place,—and instantly a perfect negative was made. The resulting portraiture showed him absolutely as he was: a breathing form of human nobility; a strong, masculine, self-contained nature, stored in a stalwart frame—the face grown somewhat more rotund than formerly, through material and professional success, and lighted up with captivating but calm geniality; while over the whole presence reigned an exquisite temperance of reserve, that held every faculty in readiness to receive and record each finest fluctuation of joy or sorrow, of earnest or of sport.
Such as he there appears, we shall do well to imagine him to ourselves.
The tendency at first, among those who judged him from his writings alone, was to set him down as a misanthrope. We need not go to the other extreme now. That he inclined to gravity, in his manner and in his habit of thought, seems to be beyond question; but he was not sombre. Neither was he hilarious. At home, though he was frequently silent, he never appeared to be so from depression, except in seasons of distress at the illness of members of the household; the prevailing effect of his presence, even when he was least communicative, being that of a cheerful calm with mellow humor underlying it. One of his children said to Mr. T. W. Higginson: "There was never such a playmate in all the world." On the other hand, I remember a letter from Hawthorne (no longer accessible for exact quotation), in which he frankly speaks of himself as taking constitutionally a somewhat despondent view of things. But if he did so, he never permitted the shadow to fall upon his friends. "I should fancy from your books," Hillard confessed in a letter to him, "that you were burdened with some secret sorrow, that you had some blue chamber in your soul, into which you hardly dared to enter yourself; but when I see you, you give me the impression of a man as healthy as Adam in Paradise." Mr. Hillard once told the present writer that he had sometimes walked twenty miles along the highway with Hawthorne, not a word being spoken during the entire tramp, and had nevertheless felt as if he were in constant communication with his friend. Mr. Curtis wrote many years ago: "His own sympathy was so broad and sure, that, although nothing had been said for hours, his companion knew that not a thing had escaped his eye, nor a single pulse of beauty in the day or scene or society failed to thrill his heart. In this way his silence was most social. Everything seemed to have been said."
His fondness for seclusion, his steady refusal to talk when he did not feel like talking, and his unobtrusive but immovable independence in opinion, together with his complete disregard of conventional requirements in social intercourse, prevented Hawthorne from ever becoming a popular man. But he was the object of a loving admiration and the sincerest friendship, on the part of certain few intimates. Those who knew him best, and had been longest in relations with him, insensibly—as one observer has well suggested—caught from his fine reticence a kindred reluctance to speak about him to others. A degree of reverence was blended with their friendship, which acquired for them a sacred privacy. Having sound health physically, as well as a healthy mind, he enjoyed out-door occupations such as garden-work, rowing, fishing, and walking; but he never rode on horseback. He liked to make pedestrian trips through the country, stopping at haphazard in country taverns and farm-houses and listening to the conversation that went on there. In chance companionship of that sort, he could tolerate much freedom of speech, in consideration of the mother-wit that prompted it; but among men of his own class he never encouraged broad allusions. If anything that savored of the forbidden were introduced, he would not protest, but he at once turned the conversation towards some worthier subject. The practical vein in Hawthorne—his ingrained sympathy with the work-a-day world in which his father and his forefathers had busied themselves-adapted him to the official drudgery to which he devoted nine years of his life; although, while he was occupied with that, the ideal activities of his nature lay dormant. The two sets of faculties never could be exercised in equal measure at the same time: one or the other had to predominate. Yet in the conduct of his own affairs, so far as his pecuniary obligations were concerned, he was very prudent, and to the last degree scrupulous. One or two exceedingly small debts, which he was forced to contract, weighed upon him with a heaviness that to the ordinary commercial mind would be altogether inconceivable; and the relief he experienced when he was able to cancel them was inexpressible. His fault, in business, was that he attributed to other people a sense of honor equal to his own. This entailed upon him sundry losses which he was not well able to afford, through loans made to supposed friends. Notwithstanding the carefulness of his expenditure and a few moderately good receipts from the publication of his books in England, he died leaving a property of little more than twenty thousand dollars, besides his house at Concord and the copyright of his works.
In addition to the strong physical frame and tall stature several times noticed in the present sketch, Hawthorne's personal appearance was distinguished by his large and lustrous gray-blue eyes, luxuriant dark brown hair of remarkable fineness, and a delicacy of the skin that gave unusual softness to his complexion; a complexion subdued, but full of "healthy, living color," as Mrs. Hawthorne once described it. "After his Italian journey he altered much, his hair having begun to whiten, and a thick dark mustache being permitted to grow, so that a wit described him as looking like a 'boned pirate.' When it became imperative to shake off his reticence, he seems to have had the power of impressing as much by speech as he had before done by silence. It was the same abundant, ardent, but self-contained and perfectly balanced nature that informed either phase. How commanding was this nature may be judged by the fact related of him by an acquaintance, that rude people jostling him in a crowd would give way at once 'at the sound of his low almost irresolute voice.'... Something even of the eloquent gift of old Colonel Hathorne seemed to be locked within him, like a precious heirloom rarely shown; for in England, where his position called for speech-making, he acquitted himself with brilliant honor. But the effort which this compelled was no doubt commensurate with the success. He never shrank, notwithstanding, from effort, when obligation to others put in a plea. A member of his family has told me that, when talking to any one not congenial to him, the effect of the contact was so strong as to cause an almost physical contraction of his whole stalwart frame, though so slight as to be perceptible only to eyes that knew his informal and habitual aspects; yet he would have sunk through the floor rather than betray his sensations to the person causing them. Mr. Curtis, too, records the amusement with which he watched Hawthorne paddling on the Concord River, with a friend whose want of skill caused the boat continually to veer the wrong way, and the silent generosity with which he put forth his whole strength to neutralize the error, rather than mortify his companion by explanation. His considerateness was always delicate and alert."[13] A niece of Horace Mann, who passed a part of the spring of 1852 with Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne at West Newton, supplies one little instance of this, which shall be registered here. Mrs. Dean, the lady in question, was then under engagement to teach in Boston, but had an interval of time on her hands before the work should begin. She was invited by the Hawthornes to the West Newton house (at that time owned by Mr. Mann), where she was to occupy a room which had formerly been hers. She found that a fire was carefully laid in the stove every night, to warm the room in the morning, and, thinking that too much trouble was taken on her account, she begged to be allowed to attend to this detail herself. It was then she discovered that it was Hawthorne who made up the fire; and he insisted upon continuing his service. Mrs. Dean also recalls that he listened attentively to the incidental and ordinary chat between Mrs. Hawthorne and herself, seldom making any remark, but, when he did volunteer one, giving it a pungent and epigrammatic or humorous turn. Entering the room where she was constructing a raised map for schoolroom use, he watched her with close interest for a while, and then observed: "I would rather have had the making of the world itself, in the beginning."
Taking whatever happened in a spirit always very much the same; reflective, penetrating, quietly sportive—a spirit, likewise, of patience and impartiality—Hawthorne kept his power of appreciation fresh to the very last. He could endure the humdrum tasks of government office, but they did not dull his pleasure in the simplest incidents of home-life, nor his delight in nature. "Every year the recurrent changes of season filled him with untold pleasure; and in the spring, Mrs. Hawthorne has been heard to say, he would walk with her in continuous silence, his heart full of the awe and delight with which the miracle of buds and new verdure inspired him." Taking everything in this spirit, we may repeat, mingling with the rough and the refined,