{Footnote: “Sketches from Concord and Appledore."}
While Emerson’s mind was essentially analytic, Hawthorne’s was synthetic, and, as Conway says, he did not receive the world into his intellect, but into his heart, or soul, where it was mirrored in a magical completeness. The notion that the artist requires merely an observing eye is a superficial delusion. Observation is worth little without reflection, and everything depends on the manner in which the observer deals with his facts. Emerson looked at life in order to penetrate it; Hawthorne, in order to comprehend it, and assimilate it to his own nature. The one talked heroism and the other lived it. Not but that Emerson’s life was a stoical one, but Hawthorne’s was still more so, and only his wife and children knew what a heart there was in him.
The world will never know what these two great men thought of one another. Hawthorne has left some fragmentary sentences concerning Emerson, such as, “that everlasting rejecter of all that is, and seeker for he knows not what,” and “Emerson the mystic, stretching his hand out of cloud-land in vain search for something real;” but he likes Emerson’s ingenuous way of interrogating people, “as if every man had something to give him.” However, he makes no attempt at a general estimate; although this expression should also be remembered: “Clergymen, whose creed had become like an iron band about their brows, came to Emerson to obtain relief,”—a sincere recognition of his spiritual influence.
Several witnesses have testified that Emerson had no high opinion of Hawthorne’s writing,—that he preferred Reade’s “Christie Johnstone” to “The Scarlet Letter,” but Emerson never manifested much interest in art, simply for its own sake. Like Bismarck, whom he also resembled in his enormous self-confidence, he cared little for anything that had not a practical value. He read Shakespeare and Goethe, not so much for the poetry as for the “fine thoughts” he found in them. George Bradford stated more than once that Emerson showed little interest in the pictorial art; and after walking through the sculpture-gallery of the Vatican, he remarked that the statues seemed to him like toys. His essay on Michel Angelo is little more than a catalogue of great achievements; he recognizes the moral impressiveness of the man, but not the value of his sublime conceptions. Music, neither he nor Hawthorne cared for, for it belongs to emotional natures.
In his “Society and Solitude” Emerson has drawn a picture of Hawthorne as the lover of a hermitical life; a picture only representing that side of his character, and developed after Emerson’s fashion to an artistic extreme. “Whilst he suffered at being seen where he was, he consoled himself with the delicious thought of the inconceivable number of places where he was not,” and “He had a remorse running to despair, of his social gaucheries, and walked miles and miles to get the twitching out of his face, the starts and shrugs out of his shoulders.”
{Footnote: “Society and Solitude,” 4, 5.}
There is a touch of arrogance in this, and it merely marks the difference between the modest author of the “Essays,” and the proud, censorious Emerson of 1870; but his love of absolute statements ofttimes led him into strange contradictions, and the injustice which results from judging our fellow-mortals by an inflexible standard was the final outcome of his optimism. Hawthorne was more charitable when he remarked that without Byron’s faults we should not have had his virtues; but the truth lies between the two.
There have been many instances of genius as sensitive as Hawthorne’s in various branches of art: Shelley and Southey, Schubert and Chopin, Correggio and Corot. Southey not only blushed red but blushed blue—as if the life were going out of him; and in Chopin and Correggio at least we feel that they could not have been what they were without it. Napoleon, whose nerves were like steel wires, suffered nevertheless from a peculiar kind of physical sensitiveness. He could not take medicines like other men,—a small dose had a terrible effect on him,—and it was much the same with respect to changes of food, climate, and the like.
What Hawthorne required was sympathetic company. Do not we all require it? The hypercritical morality of the Emersonians, especially in Concord, could not have been favorable to his mental ease and comfort. How could a man in a happily married condition feel anything but repugnance to Thoreau’s idea of marriage as a necessary evil; or Alcott’s theory that eating animal food tended directly to the commission of crime?
On the first anniversary of Hawthorne’s wedding, a tragical drama was enacted in Concord, in which he was called upon to perform a subordinate part. One Miss Hunt, a school-teacher and the daughter of a Concord farmer, drowned herself in the river nearly opposite the place where Hawthorne was accustomed to bathe. The cause of her suicide has never been adequately explained, but as she was a transcendentalist, or considered herself so, there were those who believed that in some occult way that was the occasion of it. However, as one of her sisters afterward followed her example, it would seem more likely to have come from the development of some family trait. She was seen walking upon the bank for a long time, before she took the final plunge; but the catastrophe was not discovered until near evening.