Hawthorne and His Circle. Julian Hawthorne
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speak in our little West Newton, we felt as if we were almost embarked upon a campaign—upon an altruistic campaign of emancipation against the Hapsburg oppressor. The excitement was not confined to persons of mature age and understanding; it raged among the smaller fry, and every boy was a champion of Kossuth. The train conveying the hero from New York to Boston (whence he was to return to West Newton after the reception there) was timed to pass through our midst at three o 'clock in the afternoon, and our entire population was at the track-side to see it go by. After one or two false alarms it came in sight round the curve, the smokestack of the engine swathed in voluminous folds of Old Glory. The smoke-stacks of those days were not like our scientific present-day ones; they were huge, inverted cones, affording ample surface for decoration. The train did not stop at our station; but Kossuth no doubt looked out of the window as he flew past and bowed his acknowledgments of our cheers. He was to return to us the next day, and, meanwhile, the town-hall, or the church, or whatever building it was that was to be the scene of his West Newton triumph was put in order for his reception. The person who writes these words, whose ears had eagerly devoured the story of the Hungarian revolt, wished to give the august visitor some personal assurance of his distinguished consideration, and it was finally agreed by his indulgent parents that he should print upon a card the legend, "GOD BLESS YOU, KOSSUTH," and be afforded an opportunity personally to present it to the guest of the nation. Many cards had been used and cast aside before the scribe, his fingers tremulous with emotion, had produced something which the Hungarian might be reasonably expected to find legible. Then, supported by his father and mother, and with his uncles, aunts, and cousins doubtless not far off, he proceeded proudly but falteringly to the scene of the presentation. He dimly recalls a large interior space, profusely decorated with stars and stripes, and also the colors of Hungary. At the head of the room was a great placard with "WELCOME, KOSSUTH" inscribed upon it. There was a great throng and press of men and women, a subdued, omnipresent roar of talk, and a setting of the tide towards the place where the patriot stood to receive our personal greetings. The scribe whom I have mentioned, being as yet brief of stature, was unable to see anything except coat-tails and petticoats, until of a sudden there was a breaking away of these obstacles and he found himself in close proximity to a gentleman of medium height, strongly built, with a mop of dark hair framing a handsome, pale, smiling face, the lower parts of which were concealed by a thick brown beard. It was Kossuth, and there was that in his countenance and expression which satisfied all the dreams of his admirer. He was chatting and shaking hands with the elder persons; and in a minute we were moving on again, and the printed card, for which the whole function had been created, had not been presented. At the last moment, in an agony of apprehension, the boy pulled at his mother's skirt and whispered piteously, "But my card!" She heard and remembered; but need was for haste; we had already passed the vantage-point. She snatched it from the tightly gripping fingers of the bearer, handed it to Kossuth, and at the same moment, with a gesture, directed his attention to her small companion. The Hungarian read the inscription at a glance, looked me in the eyes with a quick smile of comprehension, and, stepping towards me, laid his hand upon my head. It was a great moment for me; but as I went away I suddenly dissolved in tears, whether from the reaction of emotion, or because I had not myself succeeded in delivering my gift, I cannot now determine. But Kossuth thereby became, and for years he continued to be, the most superb figure in my political horizon.
All this while The Blithedale Romance was being written. Inasmuch as it was finished on the last day of April, 1852, it could not have occupied the writer more than five months in the composition. Winter was his best time for literary work, and there was winter enough that year in West Newton. In the middle of April came the heaviest snowstorm of the season. Brook Farm (modified in certain respects to suit the conditions) was the scene of the story, and Brook Farm was within a fair walk of West Newton. I visited the place some thirty years later, and found the general topographical features substantially as described in the book. In 1852 it was ten years since Hawthorne had lived there, and though he might have renewed his acquaintance with it while the writing was going on, there is no record of his having done so; and considering the unfavorable weather, and the fact that the imaginative atmosphere which writers seek is enhanced by distance in time, just as the physical effect of a landscape is improved by distance of space, makes it improbable that he availed himself of the opportunity. His note-books contain but few comments upon the routine of life of the community; his letters to his wife (then Sophia Peabody) are somewhat fuller; one can trace several of these passages, artistically metamorphosed, in the romance. The episode of the masquerade picnic is based on fact, and the scene of the recovery of Zenobia's body from the river is a tolerably close reproduction of an event in Concord, in which, several years before, Hawthorne had been an actor.
The portrayal in the story of city life from the back windows of the hotel, is derived from notes made just before we went to Lenox; there are the enigmatic drawing-room windows, the kitchen, the stable, the spectral cat, and the emblematic dove; the rain-storm; the glimpse of the woman sewing in one of the windows. There is also a passage containing a sketch of the personage who served as the groundwork for Old Moody. "An elderly ragamuffin, in a dingy and battered hat, an old surtout, and a more than shabby general aspect; a thin face and a red nose, a patch over one eye, and the other half drowned in moisture. He leans in a slightly stooping posture on a stick, forlorn and silent, addressing nobody but fixing his one moist eye on you with a certain intentness. He is a man who has been in decent circumstances at some former period of his life, but, falling into decay, he now haunts about the place, as a ghost haunts the spot where he was murdered. The word ragamuffin," he adds, with characteristic determination to be exact, "does not accurately express the man, because there is a sort of shadow or delusion of respectability about him, and a sobriety, too, and a kind of dignity in his groggy and red-nosed destitution." Out of this subtle correction of his own description arose the conception of making Old Moody the later state of the once wealthy and magnificent Fauntleroy. But one of the most striking and imaginative touches in the passage, likening the old waif to a ghost haunting the spot (Parker's liquor-bar) where he was murdered, is omitted in the book, because, striking though it was, it was a little too strong to be in keeping with the rest of the fictitious portrait. How many writers, having hit upon such a simile, would have had conscience and self-denial enough, not to mention fine enough artistic sense, to delete it!
The craftsman's workmanship may occasionally be traced in this way; but, as a rule, it is difficult to catch a glimpse of him in his creative moments. If he made rough draughts of his stories, he must have destroyed them after the stories themselves were completed; for none such, in the case of his finished products, was left. I have seen the manuscripts of all his tales except The Scarlet Letter, which was destroyed by James T. Fields's printers—Fields having at that time no notion of the fame the romance was to achieve, or of the value that would attach to every scrap of Hawthorne's writing. All the extant manuscripts are singularly free from erasures and interlineations; page after page is clear as a page of print. He would seem to have taught himself so thoroughly how to write that, by the time the series of his longer romances began, he was able to say what he wished to say at a first attempt. He had the habit, undoubtedly, of planning out the work of each day on the day previous, generally while walking in solitude either out-of-doors or, if that were impracticable, up and down the floor of his study. It was this habit which created the pathway along the summit of the ridge of the hill at Wayside, in Concord; it was a deeply trodden path, in the hard, root-inwoven soil, hardly nine inches wide and about two hundred and fifty yards in length. The monotonous movement of walking seemed to put his mind in the receptive state favorable for hearing the voices of imagination. The external faculties were quiescent, the veil of matter was lifted, and he was able to peruse the vision beyond.
[MAGE: JAMES T. FIELDS]
But there is an important exception to this rule to be noted in the matter of his fictitious narratives which were posthumously published. These, as I have elsewhere said, are all concerned with a single theme—the never-dying man. There are two complete versions of Septimius, of about equal length, and many passages in the two are identical. There is a short sketch on somewhat different lines, called (by the editor) The Bloody Footstep; and there is still another, and a much more elaborate attempt to embody the idea in the volume which I have entitled Doctor Grimshawe's Secret. All these, in short, are studies of one subject, and they were all unsatisfactory to the author. The true vein of which he had been in search