“Thus has this man, who would be considered a Mæcenas, 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-assertion 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 manuscript 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 manuscript, 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 publishing, 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 class 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 illustrated the faculty for “getting elected.”