Chapter 3

In the list of contributors to the old "New England Magazine,"--of which this is in a manner the legitimate successor,--among other names afterward famous is that of Nathaniel Hawthorne, then an obscure writer for various periodicals, and the ill-paid author of those juvenile histories that gave Mr. S. G. Goodrich ("Peter Parley") a literary reputation he scarcely earned.

The writer has a copy of this respectable and for a time popular monthly, with which he would be reluctant to part. It contains, for the first time printed, "The White Old Maid," one of the weirdest and most fascinating of the "Twice-Told Tales."

My present object is to invite the notice of readers of the "New England Magazine" of our day to the last completed work from the hand of that man of marvellous genius,

"Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told."

I remember with what concern I once heard a resident of Concord, a man not unknown in the world of letters, speak of certain evils likely to result from "Hawthorne's fall."

This, to me, conveyed only the idea of physical disaster, and it was with a sentiment of relief, commensurate with the contempt inspired by such an explanation, that I was given to understand that it was the great author's unselfish effort in behalf of his old college comrade and life-long friend, that was supposed to imply a state of moral declension fitly indicated by the sinister word.

It was thus that men and women, full of the cheap patriotism of the time, and puffed up with a sort of loyal egotism that blinded them to the possibilities of honest purpose in any whose views on politics and public affairs varied never so slightly from their accepted standard of right, ventured to condemn what they were constitutionally incapable of judging with either coolness or fair appreciation.

The "Life of Franklin Pierce" is by no means a great book, and neither the subject nor its treatment entitles it to a place among the immortal works that preceded and followed it; but to those of us who knew and loved the writer, and to those who through his books got some glimpses of the singular purity of his moral nature, a quality of friendship that excludes the idea of selfish interest seems its author's only and sufficient motive.

When the storm of civil war broke upon us, these worthy critics flung themselves with tongue, or pen, or sword--chiefly with tongue--into the good cause, and were scandalized at the vision of one who would fain have dreamed while they, after their various methods, were fighting; of a poet so far aloft in the regions of ideal fancy that the confused voices of battle well-nigh failed to reach him. And yet, in the words of one of their own writers,

"There was but one man living whom the country could so ill afford to lose as this strange, wayward, fitful, unreasonable poet and dreamer, who sneered at the war, and at the great nation that waged it, with the pettishness of a spoiled child."

But the charge that Hawthorne sneered at the righteous war, or, far worse, at his country, is full of an injustice which seems more bitter because it comes from one whose hearty admiration of the AUTHOR should have lifted him to a clearer appreciation of the MAN in his purity and lofty patriotism.

The writer concludes the article from which I have quoted, and which, in keen analysis and generous, literary judgment, is rarely equalled by any of Hawthorne's reviewers, with these and like ill-considered words:--

"Wherever he turned his weary steps, there stood in his path the genius of the time, not beautiful, not romantic, to his eyes; not even grand--but stern enough and in grim earnest, demanding of him what he could not give,--the heart and voice of an American citizen in the hour of America's danger."

The writer forgot, or, blinded by strong feeling, failed to perceive, that the silence which, with him as with hundreds of good and earnest men, would indeed have indicated a fatal lack of patriotic emotion, was in the case of Hawthorne only the inevitable shrinking of a rare and sensitive spirit from contact with the awful realities of conflict.

When the "Artist of the Beautiful" descended from the serene atmosphere, where his lofty spiritual nature had its true home and highest sphere of action, and devoted his delicate gifts to the useful mysteries of watch-making, the result, while eminently satisfactory to his old employer and well-wisher, the jeweller, and doubtless of blessed effect on the poor artist's purse, was disastrous in loss to the world of thought, and in its influence on his better and real self.

A writer of tenderer sympathies and nicer discrimination, takes a more kindly and a wiser view:--

"About the whole question of the war, Hawthorne's mind was, I think, always hovering between two views. He sympathized with it in principle; but its inevitable accessories--the bloodshed, the bustle, and above all, perhaps, the bunkum which accompanied it--were to him absolutely hateful.... To any one who knew the man, the mere fact that Hawthorne should have been able to make up his mind to the righteousness and expediency of the war at all, is evidence of the strength of that popular passion which drove the North and South into conflict."

But it was not Hawthorne's silence that provoked to fiercest expression the safe zeal of certain literary loyalists. This last sketch from that pen, the secret of whose magic was never communicated, and which, precious in itself, is invaluable because the last, was published in the summer of 1862--less than two years before its author's death. Its title, "Chiefly about War Matters," suggests its character. It was, in fact, a series of pictures of scenes in and about Washington at this stage of the great contest.

The present writer attempts nothing here like a review of this remarkable essay, entirely worthy as it was of its subject and its author's genius; it is simply my purpose to call the reader's attention to a production, which, more than anything else in Hawthorne's writings, has kindled the hostile criticism of shallow and uncongenial minds.

So quaintly characteristic is its commencement that I am tempted to give its opening paragraphs in full:--

"There is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically scaled seclusion, except, possibly, that of the grave, into which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate. Of course, the general heart-quake of the country long ago knocked at my cottage-door, and compelled me, reluctantly, to suspend the contemplation of certain fantasies to which, according to my harmless custom, I was endeavoring to give a sufficiently lifelike aspect to admit of their figuring in a romance. As I make no pretensions to statecraft or soldiership, and could promote the common weal neither by valor nor counsel, it seemed at first a pity that I should be debarred from such unsubstantial business as I had contrived for myself, since nothing more genuine was to be substituted for it.

"But I magnanimously considered that there is a kind of treason in inoculating one's self from the universal fear and sorrow, and thinking one's idle thoughts in the dread time of civil war; and could a man be so cold and hard-hearted, he would better deserve to be sent to Fort Warren than many who have found their way thither on the score of violent but misdirected sympathies.

"I remember the touching rebuke administered by King Charles to that rural squire, the echo of whose hunting-horn came to the poor monarch's ear on the morning before a battle, where the sovereignty and constitution of England were at stake. So I gave myself up to reading newspapers, and listening to the click of the telegraph, like other people, until after a great many months of such pastime, it grew so abominably irksome that I determined to look a little more closely at matters with my own eyes."

It was in the early days of March that Hawthorne, in company with his friend and publisher, Wm. D. Ticknor, left Boston on a visit to Washington and the seat of war, then in its immediate vicinity.

The sketches of natural scenery are touched with the same pencil that gave us the charming picture of daily life at the Old Manse.

It was in New York that the travellers had the first clear intimation of the unnatural order of things consequent on a state of civil war. Here they found a rather prominent display of military goods at the shop windows--such as swords, with gilded scabbards and trappings, epaulettes, carbines, revolvers, and sometimes a great iron cannon at the edge of the pavement, as if Mars had dropped one of his pocket-pistols there while hurrying to the field.

As railway companions, they had now and then a volunteer in his French-gray great coat, returning from furlough, or a new-made officer travelling to join his regiment in his new-made uniform, which was perhaps all of the military character that he had about him; but proud of his eagle buttons, and likely enough to, do them honor before the gilt should be wholly dimmed.

The country, in short, so far as bustle and movement went, was more quiet than in ordinary times, because so large a proportion of its restless elements had been drawn towards the seat of conflict.

But the air was full of a vague disturbance.

The author's patriotic alarm seems to have been especially excited by the host of embryo warriors that filled the cars and thronged the stations all along the journey. One cause of this terror will seem to us now all the more amusing because there are not wanting those who will doubtless honestly believe that in giving it expression he wrote with something of prophetic unction:--

"One terrible idea occurs in reference to this matter. Even supposing the war should end to-morrow, and the army melt into the mass of the population within the year, what an incalculable preponderance will there be of military titles and pretentions for at least half a century to come! Every country neighborhood will have its general or two, its three or four colonels, half a dozen majors, and captains without end--besides noncommissioned officers and privates, more than the recruiting officers ever knew of,--all with their campaign stories which will become the staple of fireside talk forevermore.

"Military merit, or rather, since that is not so readily estimated, military notoriety, will be the measure of all claims to civil distinction.

"One bullet-headed general will succeed another in the presidential chair; and veterans will hold the offices at home and abroad, and sit in Congress and the State Legislature, and fill all the avenues of public life. And yet I do not speak of this deprecatingly, since, very likely, it may substitute something more real and genuine, instead of the many shams on which men have heretofore founded their claims to public regard; but it behooves civilians to consider their wretched prospects in the future, and assume the military button before it is too late."

The day of their arrival in Washington was the date of McClellan's historic movement on Manassas:--

"On the very day of our arrival sixty thousand men had crossed the Potomac on their march towards Manassas; and almost with their first steps into the Virginia mud, the phantasmagory of a countless host and impregnable ramparts, before which they had so long remained quiescent, dissolved quite away.

"It was as if General McClellan had thrust his sword into a gigantic enemy, and, beholding him suddenly collapse, had discovered to himself and the world that he had merely punctured an enormously swollen bladder.

"There are instances of a similar character in old romances, where great armies are long kept at bay by the arts of the necromancers, who build airy towers and battlements, and muster warriors of terrible aspect, and thus feign a defence of seeming impregnability, until some bolder champion of the besiegers dashes forward to try an encounter with the foremost foeman, and finds him melt away in the death-grapple. With such heroic adventures let the march upon Manassas be hereafter reckoned.

"The whole business, though connected with the destinies of a nation, takes inevitably a tinge of the ludicrous.

"The vast preparation of men and warlike material,--the majestic patience and docility,--with which the people waited through those weary and dreary months,--the martial skill, courage, and caution, with which our movement was ultimately made,--and at last the shock with which we were brought suddenly up against nothing at all!"

It is in dealing with ponderous and awful blunders like this that the satiric power of the writer finds its favorite field of action.

It is not strange that, in those excited times of bitterness and strife, certain genuine but shallow souls should have counted it little short of treason to extract anything like fun from an episode which for us, in the day of it, was full of very solemn mortification. In this sketch, as indeed all through his works, it is in the delineation of individual character--in the analysis of motives--that Hawthorne's peculiar and amazing power is especially manifest, intermingled withal with a certain droll self-distrust and deprecation of adverse criticism, to which he has here given expression in a series of foot-notes, ostensibly from the editor's pen, but written in fact by the author himself.

The mixture of candor and apologetic self-disapproval in these addenda has a sufficiently odd effect, intermingled as it is with the utmost freedom of comment and criticism.

Prominent generals, cabinet ministers, and even the President himself, are dealt with in a vein of satiric candor, but with a pervasive spirit of good-nature evident enough and of sufficient breadth to disarm even official sensitiveness of anything like rancor.

Whatever personal descriptions the author may have meditated, or accomplished and afterward suppressed, the only full-length portrait he has given us is that of McClellan, of all the deeper interest and value now that both these famous Americans are numbered with the dead.

His impressions of President Lincoln seemed colored with a trace of prejudice, which, however unjust and unfortunate it may appear to us now, was really only the inevitable consequence of the wide intellectual gulf that yawned between those two men, both of positive character, and with tastes and sympathies the most radically opposite. But despite this unavoidable repulsion, Hawthorne's keen, resistless insight did not fail to penetrate the wonderful purity and simplicity of Lincoln's character. In a final word he does him ample justice:--

"He is evidently a man of keen faculties, and, what is still more to the purpose, of powerful character.

"As to his integrity, the people have that intuition of it which is never deceived. Before he actually entered upon his great office, and for a considerable time afterwards, there is no reason to suppose that he adequately estimated the gigantic task about to be imposed upon him, or, at least, had any distinct idea how it was to be managed; and I presume there may have been more than one veteran politician to propose to himself to take the power out of President Lincoln's hands into his own, leaving our honest friend only the public responsibility for the good or ill success of the career. The extremely imperfect development of his statesmanly qualities at that period may have justified such designs. But the President is teachable by events, and has now spent a year in a very arduous course of education; he has a flexible mind, capable of much expansion, and convertible towards far loftier studies and activities than those of his early life; and if he came to Washington a backwoods humorist, he has already transformed himself into as good a statesman (to speak modestly) as his prime minister."

So long as a general's sword is seemingly invincible, and the uniformity of his success silences even the cavillings of envy,--that most persistent of all the unlovely emotions,--just so long he may safely count on a unanimity of public approval. But let disaster befall, and, justly or otherwise, it matters little which, the voices just now most vociferous for coronation, bellow the loudest for crucifixion! Few of our commanders in the late war had bitterer evidence of this than McClellan. Idolized while victorious, he was vituperated with corresponding violence the instant fortune showed signs of wavering in her fidelity. At this distance from those stirring times we can easily perceive that the idolatry and the abuse were alike unjust and even ridiculous; the same wisdom that pronounces it unsafe to praise a man until death has set the seal to his earthly reputation, deems it no less a folly to bestow adulation or excessive blame on a military commander before the end of his campaigns. To his brief estimate of McClellan's character and qualifications for his post of vast responsibility, our author brought an admirable coolness of judgment, and that wonderful insight into men and motives so seldom at fault. Keenly alive to the ridiculousness of the attack on Manassas, and declaring that "no rebel artillery has played upon us with such overwhelming effect," he was capable, with a fairness sufficiently amazing in any critic of those days, of doing full justice to the general's indubitable ability and patriotism. He closes his sketch of McClellan, by no means the least valuable part of the article we are considering, with this decided expression of opinion: "I shall not give up my faith in his soldiership until he is defeated, nor in his courage and integrity even then."

An odd peculiarity of Hawthorne's mind was the incertitude--I use this vile word in lack of a better at the moment--that seemed at times to invest his reasoning powers with a sort of Indian summer haziness.

This idiosyncrasy had a striking exemplification when our travellers met "a party of contrabands escaping out of the mysterious depths of Secessia."

"They were unlike the specimens of their race whom we are accustomed to see at the North, and, in my judgment, were far more agreeable.

"So rudely were they attired,--as if their garb had grown upon them spontaneously,--so picturesquely natural in manners, and wearing such a crust of primeval simplicity (which is quite polished away from the Northern black man), that they seemed a kind of creature by themselves, not altogether human, but perhaps quite as good, and akin to the fauns and rustic deities of olden times. I wonder if I shall excite anybody's wrath by saying this?

"It is no great matter at all events. I felt most kindly towards the poor fugitives, but knew not precisely what to wish in their behalf, nor in the least how to help them. For the sake of the manhood which is latent in them, I would not have turned them back; but I should have felt almost as reluctant on their own account to hasten them forward to the strangers' land; and I think my prevalent idea was that, whoever may be benefited by the results of this war, it will not be the present generation of negroes, the childhood of whose race has now gone forever, and who must henceforth fight a hard battle with the world on very unequal terms. On behalf of my own race, I am glad, and can only hope that an inscrutable Providence means good to both parties."

The whimsical feature in Hawthorne's character to which we have alluded, is thus noticed by an intimate and valued friend of the great author:--

"Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet the difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly upon his mind. He told me once that while he had been consul at Liverpool a vessel arrived there with a number of negro sailors, who had been brought from slave States, and would, of course, be enslaved on their return. He fancied that he ought to inform the men of the fact, but then he was stopped by the reflection--who was to provide for them if they became free? and, as he said with a sigh, 'While I was thinking, the vessel sailed.' So I recollect, on the old battlefield of Manassas, on which I strolled in company with Hawthorne, meeting a batch of runaway slaves--weary, footsore, wretched, and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine, some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train going northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me with the remark, 'I am not sure that we were doing right, after all. How can those poor beings find food and shelter away from home?'

"Thus this ingrained and inherent doubt incapacitated him from following any course vigorously.

"He thought on the whole that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd Garrison and the abolitionists were in the right, but then he was never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after all; so that his advocacy of their cause was of a very uncertain character."

There is a constant temptation to transcend proper limits in quoting from this most characteristic production of our great author.

It was my purpose simply to recall to the minds of readers an article whose authorship was scarcely known at the time of its appearance (in the July of 1862), and which has never been included in its writer's collected works.

Nothing in Hawthorne's books--not even excepting "Twice-Told Tales"--is more suggestive and eloquent of the man and the author.

The same matchless purity of style, with never a sophomoric flight nor a tinge of dulness; replete with subtle humor, and an irony whose tempered edge scarcely wounds by reason of the attendant richness of good nature that "steals away its sharpness"; as in the same soil that nourishes the keen, aggressive nettle, is always found a certain herb of healing potency. I cannot refrain from giving our readers some passages near the close. They are descriptive of certain guests at Willard's Hotel, in Washington, where the travellers lived during their stay at the Capital.

This portion of Hawthorne's last magazine article recalls forcibly passages in the first of his published stories, "The Gray Champion."

"It is curious to observe what antiquated figures and costumes sometimes make their appearance at Willard's. You meet elderly men with frilled shirt-fronts, for example, the fashion of which adornment passed away from among the people of this world half a century ago.

"It is as if one of Stuart's portraits were walking abroad.

"I see no way of accounting for this, except that the troubles of the times, the impiety of traitors, and the peril of our sacred Union and Constitution have disturbed in their honored graves, some of the venerable fathers of the country, and summoned them forth to protest against the meditated and half-accomplished sacrilege.

"If it be so, their wonted fires are not altogether extinguished in their ashes,--in their throats, I might rather say,--for I beheld one of these excellent old men quaffing such a horn of Bourbon whiskey as a toper of the present century would be loath to venture upon.

"But, really, one would be glad to know where these strange figures come from.