Hawthorne’s earthly paradise only endured until the autumn of 1843. When cool weather arrived, want and care came also. On November 26 he wrote to George S. Hillard:
“I wish at some leisure moment you would give yourself the trouble to call into Munroe’s book-store and inquire about the state of my ‘Twice-told Tales.’ At the last accounts (now about a year since) the sales had not been enough to pay expenses; but it may be otherwise now—else I shall be forced to consider myself a writer for posterity; or at all events not for the present generation. Surely the book was puffed enough to meet with a sale.”
{Footnote: London Athenæum, August 10, 1889.}
The interpretation of this is that Longfellow, Hillard and Bridge could appreciate Hawthorne’s art, but the solid men of Boston (with some rare exceptions) could not. Even Webster preferred the grotesque art of Dickens to Hawthorne’s “wells of English undefiled.” Recently, one of the few surviving original copies of “Fanshawe” was sold at auction for six hundred dollars. Such is the difference between genius and celebrity.
The trouble then and now is that wealthy Americans as a class feel no genuine interest in art or literature. They do not form a true aristocracy, but a plutocracy, and are for the most part very poorly educated. It was formerly the brag of the Winthrops and Otises that they could go through college and learn their lessons in the recitation-room. Now they go to row, and play foot-ball, and after they graduate, they leave the best portion of their lives behind them. Then if they have a talent for business they become absorbed in commercial affairs; or if not, they travel from one country to another, picking up a smattering of everything, but not resting long enough in any one place for their impressions to develop and bear good fruit. They are not like the aristocratic classes of England, France and Germany, who become cultivated men and women, and serve to maintain a high standard of art and literature in those countries.
The captain of a Cunard steamship, who owned quite a library, said in 1869: “I have bought some very interesting books in New York, especially by a writer named Hawthorne, but the type and paper are so poor that they are not worth binding.” The reason why American publishers do not bring out books in such good form as foreign publishers—is that there is no demand for a first-rate article. Thus do the fine arts languish. When rich young Americans take as much interest in painting and sculpture as they do in foot-ball and yachting, we shall have our Vandycks and Murillos,—if nothing better.
Discouraged with the ill success of “Fanshawe,” Hawthorne had limited himself since then to the writing of short sketches, such as would be acceptable to the magazine editors, and now that he had formed this habit, he found it difficult to escape from it. He informs us in the preface to “Mosses from an Old Manse” that he had hoped a more serious and extended plot would come to him on the banks of Concord River, but his imagination did not prove equal to the occasion. Most of the stories in “Mosses” must have been composed at Concord, but “Mrs. Bull-Frog’” and “Monsieur du Miroir” must have been written previously, for he refers to them in a letter at Brook Farm. A few were published in the Democratic Review, and others may have been elsewhere; but the proceeds he derived from them would not have supported a day-laborer, and toward the close of his second year at the Manse, Hawthorne found himself running in debt for the necessaries of life. He endured this with his usual stoical reticence, although there is nothing like debt to sicken a man’s heart,—unless he be a decidedly light-minded man. Better fortune, however, was on its way to him in the shape of a political revolution.
On March 3, 1844, a daughter was born to the Hawthornes, whom they named Una, in spite of Hillard’s objection that the name was too poetic or too fanciful for the prosaic practicalities of real life. The name was an excellent one for a poet’s daughter, and did not seem out of place in Arcadian Concord. Miss Una grew up into a graceful, fair and poetic young lady,—in all respects worthy of her name. She had an uncommonly fine figure, and, as often happens with first-born children, resembled her father much more than her mother. Her name also suggests the early influence of Spenser in her father’s style and mode of thought.
Soon after this fortunate event Hawthorne wrote a letter to Hillard, in which he said:
“I find it a very sober and serious kind of happiness that springs from the birth of a child. It ought not come too early in a man’s life—not till he has fully enjoyed his youth—for methinks the spirit can never be thoroughly gay and careless again, after this great event. We gain infinitely by the exchange; but we do give up something nevertheless. As for myself who have been a trifler preposterously long, I find it necessary to come out of my cloud-region, and allow myself to be woven into the sombre texture of humanity.”