Nathaniel Hawthorne

by George Edward Woodberry

"I do not know what Sophia may have said about my conduct in the Consulate. I only know that I have done no good,—none whatever. Vengeance and beneficence are things that God claims for Himself. His instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are not His instruments. The good of others, like our own happiness, is not to be attained by direct effort, but incidentally. All history and observation confirm this. I am really too humble to think of doing good! Now, I presume you think the abolition of flogging was a vast boon to seamen. I see, on the contrary, with perfect distinctness, that many murders and an immense mass of unpunishable cruelty—a thousand blows, at least, for every one that the cat-of-nine-tails would have inflicted—have resulted from that very thing. There is a moral in this fact which I leave you to deduce. God's ways are in nothing more mysterious than in this matter of trying to do good."

This is the same voice that was heard in "The House of the Seven Gables" and "The Blithedale Romance," and shows how deep-seated was Hawthorne's antipathy to conscious philanthropy, and doubtless he meant Elizabeth Peabody as she read it to lay it to heart as an abolitionist.

If Hawthorne observed much cruelty among the crews of American ships, he must have accepted it as a part of the general misery of the world with as much philosophy as he was master of, while he did his duty with regard to it according to his opportunities. He was well liked by the sea captains who came in contact with him. He had, indeed, a good previous training, inasmuch as his terms of service in the Custom House had made him familiarly acquainted with this seafaring type, to which he was also akin. He met the American captains not only at his office, but at the boarding-house of Mrs. Blodgett, where they resorted in numbers, and where he himself lived at various times, and during the whole period of his wife's absence in Portugal. This house is described by himself as strongly impregnated with tar and bilge-water, and the men as very much alive. He admired them, and thought they contrasted very favorably with Englishmen in vitality, and he liked to be with them. Just as he had associated happily and on equal terms with similar men whom he had known in his own country, and made good-fellowship with them at Salem, he now was a welcome and companionable member of this hardy group, which his son Julian remembered in its general look and quality, and describes in a smoking-room scene that makes this side of Hawthorne more lifelike than it appears elsewhere:—

"The smoking-room was an apartment barely twenty feet square, though of a fair height; but the captains smoked a great deal, and by nine o'clock sat enveloped in a blue cloud. They played euchre with a jovial persistence that seems wonderful in the retrospect, especially as there was no gambling. The small boys in the house (there were two or three) soon succeeded in mastering the mysteries of the game, and occasionally took a hand with the captains. Hawthorne was always ready to play, and used to laugh a great deal at the turns of fortune. He rather enjoyed card-playing, and was a very good hand at whist; and knew, besides, a number of other games, many of which are now out of fashion, but which he, I suppose, had learned in his college days. Be the diversion or the conversation what it might, he was never lacking in geniality and good-fellowship; and sparkles of wit and good humor continually came brightening out of his mouth, making the stalwart captains haw-haw prodigiously, and wonder, perhaps, where his romances came from. Nevertheless, in his official capacity, he sometimes made things (in their own phrase) rather lively for them; and it is a tribute to his unfailing good sense and justice, that his enforcement of the law never made him unpopular."

Christmas Day was an occasion of special festivity at this boarding-house, and that of 1855 was unusually distinguished in its annals by the presence of Hawthorne and the legend of the merry-making about him which his friend Bright put into his clever rhymes of the "Song of Consul Hawthorne." Whether in his office, or at the boarding-house, or going about the docks at Liverpool, "Consul Hawthorne" was evidently a very typical New Englander abroad, and popular with his own people. He had laid the author off, and was as purely a practical man of nautical affairs as would be found in any shipping office in the city; and it needed no close observer to see that the native element in him was of a very obstinate and unmalleable nature.

It has been suggested that Hawthorne was afraid of liking English people better than an American ought, as he says he suspects Grace Greenwood did:—

"She speaks rapturously of the English hospitality and warmth of heart. I likewise have already experienced something of this, and apparently have a good deal more of it at my option. I wonder how far it is genuine, and in what degree it is better than the superficial good feeling with which Yankees receive foreigners,—a feeling not calculated for endurance, but a good deal like a brushwood fire. We shall see!"

He had abundant opportunity to see, for he was very kindly received by the society which it was natural for him to mingle with, and several of his hosts were untiring in their efforts to please him and render him comfortable. He was by no means incapable of social intercourse, notwithstanding his retired habits; the capacity had never been developed by early breeding or by later necessity, and though on his return home, the change in him was noticeable, even under the influence of his foreign travels he remained a silent, difficult, and evasive person in society. When he was among his own old and familiar friends, such as Bridge or Pierce, or with new companions whom he accepted into his circle, such as Fields, he was open enough and took his share genially and sometimes jovially, as well as when he was with the American sea captains or his old associates in Salem; but the touch of social formality, the presence of a stranger, the ways and habits of conventionality shut him up in impenetrable reserve and made him temporarily miserable. In England, however, he was compelled to meet and be met in the ordinary intercourse of men and women, and he fared much better than might have been anticipated. Very greatly to the surprise of his friends he proved an excellent after-dinner speaker, not only on the public occasions where the sense of his official station as a representative of his country would have spurred him to acquit himself well, but also at private parties and in purely personal relations. Like many silent men he was a good listener, and his sensitiveness and mental alertness gave the impression of more sympathy than perhaps he felt. He made himself agreeable, at all events, and he submitted to an amount of human fellowship that was astonishing to himself. The novelty of the society he entered, doubtless, attracted him, and fed his curiosity, as it certainly was an excitement to his wife. They had lived all their lives in a community so much simpler in all the furnishings of refined living, so much less characterized by the material luxuries of wealth, than this in which they now found themselves, that the mere sight of the houses, dinners, and liveries was a new experience, and they observed them like country cousins. The manners of this society, also, arrested their attention. It was inevitable that Hawthorne should maintain an aloofness from all this, nevertheless, with the natural democratic questioning of the reality of the courtesy, the propriety of the system, the kind and quality of the social results. He felt the appeal that this life made, he perceived its fitness to the soil, he saw it as a growth that belonged in its place; but he was thoroughly glad that there was nothing like it in his own country. There is not the slightest hint in any word of his that he regarded himself as an ambassador of friendship in a foreign country or thought that it was any part of his duty to cultivate international good feeling: he felt himself politically, socially, fundamentally, an alien in England, and he preferred to be so; what first struck him were those obvious differences that distinguish the two peoples, and these remained most prominently in his mind. He was a stranger when he landed at Liverpool, and he never suffered the least tincture of naturalization while he was in the country.

This attitude determines the point of view in his notes and reminiscences. He was an observer, close and accurate and interested; but he had not that sympathy which seeks to understand, to interpret, to justify what one sees, and to put one's self in accord with it. He had his standards already well fixed, and his limitations which he was not sufficiently aware of to desire to escape. He had, too, the critical spirit which is a New England trait, and with this went its natural attendant, the habit of speaking his mind. In writing down his impressions of English manners and institutions and people, he behaved exactly as he had done in his records of similar things at home; there was no difference in his method or in the character of what he said; he was telling what he saw with that indifference to how it would strike other people which comes near to being unconsciousness. He was a good deal surprised when he discovered that the English did not relish what he said; he protested that he had done them more than justice, that they were too easily hurt, and as for hating them, he adds, "I would as soon hate my own people." There is no ill-nature in "Our Old Home;" there is only the clearly expressed, bare, unsympathetic statement of what he had seen, touched here and there with that irony and humor which were apt to mix with his view of men and things. So the people at Salem had thought he did them injustice in his sketch of his native home, and he in turn had told them that he had treated them very considerately, without enmity or ill feeling of any kind, and in fact what he had written "could not have been done in a better or kindlier spirit nor with a livelier effect of truth." He had written of England in precisely the same way, with that remorseless adherence to his own impression which was second nature to him, and with that willingness to see the wrong side of things that he disliked, to minimize human nature when it bored him, and to get a grim humor out of his victims, which was also a part of his endowment. In all this, as in some other parts of Hawthorne's personality, there is a reminder of Carlyle. The hard judgment he wrote down of Margaret Fuller, for example, and the humorous extravagance of his visit to Martin Tupper, are not to be paralleled except in Carlyle's reminiscences; there was the same unflinching rigor, the same cold obtuseness, the same half-wearied contempt for what excited their humor in both men. In his vexation of spirit Hawthorne is especially suggestive of some discomfortable cousinship between them; and he was often vexed in spirit. He was, it would seem, especially burdened by the material comfort of England, in which he found a grossness but little consonant with his own taste and spirit, and he made of this the type of things English, as it is easy to do:—

"The best thing a man born in this island can do is to eat his beef and mutton and drink his porter, and take things as they are; and think thoughts that shall be so beefish, muttonish, portish, and porterish, that they shall be matters rather material than intellectual. In this way an Englishman is natural, wholesome, and good; a being fit for the present time and circumstances, and entitled to let the future alone!"