The Collected Gothic Tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated Edition). Nathaniel Hawthorne
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should be compelled to retire.... But for your paragraph, I should have thought it necessary to enlighten the public on the true state of the case as regards the treatment of seamen on our merchant vessels, and I do not know but I may do it yet; in which case I shall prove that General Cass made a most deplorable mistake in the above-mentioned letter to Lord Napier. I shall send the despatch to Ticknor, at any rate, for publication if necessary. I expect great pleasure during my stay on the Continent, and shall come home at last somewhat reluctantly. Your pledge on my behalf of a book shall be honored in good time, if God pleases."
The intention of taking his family at once to Paris was given up, and instead Hawthorne went with them to Manchester, the Lakes, and Scotland, and made a pilgrimage to Warwick and Coventry, besides visiting many other places. The new consul, however, postponed his coming until near the end of 1857. Not before January, 1858, did Hawthorne break away from the fascinations of England and cross to the Continent. When, after spending more than a year and a half in Italy, he again set foot in England, it was to establish himself at Redcar, a sea-side town in Yorkshire, where he finished "The Marble Faun" in October, 1859; and thence he betook himself to Leamington, which had greatly pleased him on a previous visit. Here his old friend, Mr. Hillard, called upon him; and in an article printed in the "Atlantic Monthly," in 1870, he says: "The writer of this notice, who confesses to an insatiable passion for the possession of books, and an omnivorous appetite for their contents, was invited by him into his study, the invitation being accompanied with one of his peculiar and indescribable smiles, in which there lurked a consciousness of his (the writer's) weakness. The study was a small square room, with a table and chair, but absolutely not a single book. He liked writing better than reading." Mr. Hillard's implication, however, is a misleading one. "Hawthorne," says Mr. Fields, "was a hearty devourer of books, and in certain moods of mind it made very little difference what the volume before him happened to be.... He once told me that he found such delight in old advertisements in the newspaper files at the Boston Athenæum, that he had passed delicious hours among them. At other times he was very fastidious, and threw aside book after book, until he found the right one. De Quincey was a favorite with him, and the sermons of Laurence Sterne he once commended to me as the best sermons ever written." His correspondence was not "literary," to be sure; but in his letters to Mr. Fields, who had to do so especially with books, occasional references to literature escape him, which did not ordinarily find their way into his letters to other people. From England, in 1854, he wrote to that gentleman: "I thank you for the books you sent me, and more especially for Mrs. Mowatt's 'Autobiography,' which seems to me an admirable book. Of all things I delight in autobiographies; and I hardly ever read one that interested me so much." He did not read for erudition or for criticism, but he certainly read much, and books were companions to him. I have seen several catalogues of libraries which Hawthorne had marked carefully, proving that, although he made no annotations, he had studied the titles with a natural reader's loving fondness. His stay at Leamington was but a brief one, and for that reason he may well have been without books in his study at the moment; he never crowded them about himself, in the rooms where he worked, but his tower-study at The Wayside always contained a few volumes, and a few small pictures and ornaments—enough to relieve his eye or suggest a refreshment to his mind, without distracting him from composition or weakening the absorbed intensity of his thought.
The only approach to literary exertion made at Liverpool seems to have been the revision of the "Mosses from an Old Manse," for a reissue at the hands of Ticknor & Fields; employment which led to some reflections upon his own earlier works.
"I am very glad that the 'Mosses' have come into the hands of our firm; and I return the copy sent me, after a careful revision. When I wrote those dreamy sketches, I little thought I should ever preface an edition for the press amid the bustling life of a Liverpool consulate. Upon my honor, I am not quite sure that I entirely comprehend my own meaning, in some of those blasted allegories; but I remember that I always had a meaning, or at least thought I had. I am a good deal changed since those times; and, to tell you the truth, my past self is not very much to my taste, as I see myself in this book. Yet certainly there is more in it than the public generally gave me credit for at the time it was written.
"But I don't think myself worthy of very much more credit than I got. It has been a very disagreeable task to read the book."
He was inveigled, however, into giving encouragement to that unfortunate woman, Miss Delia Bacon, who was engaged in the task of proving that Lord Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. He corresponded with her on the subject, and finally agreed, although not assenting to her theory, to write a preface for her book, which he did. She was dissatisfied because he did not accept her views entirely, grew very angry, and even broke off all relations with him, notwithstanding that he had paid the expenses of publication for her.
Arriving at Rome in February, 1858, Hawthorne lingered there until late in May, when he retired to Florence, and hired there the Villa Montauto, in the suburb of Bellosguardo. October found him again in Rome, where he spent the winter; leaving the Continent, finally, in June, 1859, for England and Redcar.
"I am afraid I have stayed away too long," he wrote from Bellosguardo, to Mr. Fields, in September, 1858, "and am forgotten by everybody. You have piled up the dusty remnants of my editions, I suppose, in that chamber over the shop, where you once took me to smoke a cigar, and have crossed my name out of your list of authors, without so much as asking whether I am dead or alive. But I like it well enough, nevertheless. It is pleasant to feel that at last I am away from America,—a satisfaction that I never enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was continually filtered and sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have escaped from all my old tracks and am really remote.
"I like my present residence immensely. The house stands on a hill, overlooking Florence, and is big enough to quarter a regiment; insomuch that each member of the family, including servants, has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of upper rooms, into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions.
"At one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower haunted by the ghost of a monk, who was confined there in the thirteenth century, previous to being burned at the stake in the principal square of Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a romance which I have in my head ready to be written out." Turning to the topic of home, he went on: "After so long an absence (more than five years already, which will be six before you see me at the Old Corner), it is not altogether delightful to think of returning. Everybody will be changed, and I, myself, no doubt, as much as anybody.... It won't do. I shall be forced to come back again and take refuge in a London lodging. London is like the grave in one respect,—any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better either die or go to London.
"Speaking of the grave reminds me of old age and other disagreeable matters, and I would remark that one grows old in Italy twice or three times as fast as in other countries. I have three gray hairs now for one that I brought from England, and I shall look venerable indeed by the time I return next summer."
The "French and Italian Note-Books" are more prolific in literary hints than the English. At Rome and Florence the practical self, which was necessarily brought forward in the daily round at the consulate and left its impress on the letters to Lieutenant Bridge, retired into the background under the influence of scenes more purely picturesque and poetic than those of England; and the idealizing, imaginative faculty of Hawthorne, being freed from the restraint which had so long cramped it, gained in elasticity from day to day. Four years of confinement to business, broken only at intervals by short episodes of travel, had done no more than impede the current of fancy; had not dried it, nor choked the source. Mr. Fields assures us that, in England, Hawthorne told him he had no less than five romances in his mind, so well planned that he could write any one of them at short notice. But it is significant that, however favorable Italy might be for drawing out and giving free course to this current, he could do little there in the way of embodying his conceptions. He wrote out an extensive first draft of "The Marble Faun" while moving from place to