Conway remarks very justly that an American author could not be expected to earn his own living in a country where foreign books could be pirated as they were in the United States until 1890, and this was especially true during the popularity of Dickens and George Eliot. Dickens was the great humanitarian writer of the nineteenth century, but he was also a caricaturist and a bohemian. He did not represent life as it is, but with a certain comical oddity. As an author he is to Hawthorne what a peony is to a rose, or a garnet is to a ruby; but ten, persons would purchase a novel of Dickens when one would select the “Twice Told Tales.” Scott and Tennyson are exceptional instances of a high order of literary work which also proved fairly remunerative; but they do not equal Hawthorne in grace of diction and in the rare quality of his thought,—whatever advantages they may possess in other respects. Thackeray earned his living by his pen, but it was only in England that he could have done this.
CHAPTER VI. — PEGASUS AT THE CART: 1839-1841
Horatio Bridge’s dam was washed away in the spring of 1837, by a sudden and unprecedented rising of the Androscoggin River. Bridge was financially ruined, but like a brave and generous young man he did not permit this stroke of evil fortune, severe as it was, to oppress him heavily, and Hawthorne seems to have felt no shadow of it during his visit to Augusta the following summer. He returned to Salem in August with pleasanter anticipations than ever before,—to enjoy the society of his fiancée, and to prepare the second volume of “Twice Told Tales.”
The course of Hawthorne’s life during the next twenty months is mostly a blank to us. He would seem to have exerted himself to escape from the monotone in which he had been living so long, but of his efforts, disappointments, and struggles against the giant coils of Fate, there is no report. He wrote the four Province House tales as a send-off to his second volume, as well as “The Toll-Gatherer’s Day,” “Footprints on the Seashore,” “Snow-Flakes,” and “Chippings with a Chisel,” which are to be found in it. {Footnote: J. Hawthorne, 176.} There is a long blank in Hawthorne’s diary during the winter of 1837-38 which may be owing to his indifference to the outer world at that time, but more likely because its contents have not yet been revealed to us. It was the period of Cilley’s duel, and what Hawthorne’s reflections were on that subject, aside from the account which he wrote for the Democratic Review, would be highly interesting now, but the absence of any reference to it is significant, and there is no published entry in his diary between December 6, 1837, and May 11, 1838.
Horatio Bridge obtained the position of paymaster on the United States warship “Cyane,” which arrived at Boston early in June, and on the 16th of the month Hawthorne went to call on his friend in his new quarters, which he found to be pleasant enough in their narrow and limited way. Bridge returned with him to Boston, and they dined together at the Tremont House, drinking iced champagne and claret in pitchers,—which latter would seem to have been a fashion of the place. Hawthorne’s description of the day is purely external, and he tells us nothing of his friend,—concerning whom we were anxious to hear,—or of the new life on which he had entered.
On July 4, his thirty-fifth birthday, he wrote a microscopic account of the proceedings on Salem Common, which is interesting now, but will become more valuable as time goes on and the customs of the American people change with it. The object of these detailed pictorial studies, which not only remind one of Dürer’s drawings but of Carlyle’s local descriptions (when he uses simple English and does not fly off into recondite comparisons), is not clearly apparent; but the artist has instincts of his own, like a vine which swings in the wind and seizes upon the first tree that its tendrils come into contact with. We sometimes wish that, as in the case of Bridge and his warship, they were not so objective and external, and that, like Carlyle, he would throw more of himself into them.
On July 27, Hawthorne started on an expedition to the Berkshire Hills, by way of Worcester, remaining there nearly till the first of September, and describing the scenery, the people he met by the way, and the commencement at Williams College, which then took place in the middle of August, in his customary accurate manner. He has given a full and connected account of his travels; so full that we wonder how he found time to write to Miss Sophia Peabody. He would seem to have been entirely alone, and to have travelled mainly by stage. On the route from Pittsfield to North Adams he notices the sunset, and describes it in these simple terms: {Footnote: American Note-book, 130.}
“After or about sunset there was a heavy shower, the thunder rumbling round and round the mountain wall, and the clouds stretching from rampart to rampart. When it abated the clouds in all parts of the visible heavens were tinged with glory from the west; some that hung low being purple and gold, while the higher ones were gray. The slender curve of the new moon was also visible, brightening amidst the fading brightness of the sunny part of the sky.”