"I shall go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be very well contented there."
But his sense of duty, stronger than that of many Americans under similar circumstances, was rigorously obeyed. We shall see what sort of reward this fidelity to country won from public opinion at home.
X.
THE LAST ROMANCE.
1860-1863.
There are in the "English Note-Books" several dismal and pathetic records of tragic cases of brutality or murder on shipboard, which it was Hawthorne's duty as consul to investigate. These things, as one might have divined they would, made a very strong and deep impression upon him; and he tried strenuously to interest the United States government in bettering the state of the marine by new laws. But though this evil was and is still quite as monstrous as that of slavery, there was no means of mixing up prejudice and jealousy with the reform, to help it along, and he could effect nothing. He resolved, on returning home, to write some articles—perhaps a volume—exposing the horrors so calmly overlooked; but the slavery agitation, absorbing everybody, perhaps discouraged him: the scheme was never carried out. It is a pity; for, aside from the weight which so eminent a name might have given to a good cause, the work would have clearly proven the quick, responsive, practical nature of his humanity—a quality which some persons have seen fit to deny him—in a case where no question of conflicting rights divided his sense of duty.
He came to America in June, 1860. For several years the mutterings of rising war between the States had been growing louder. In June of 1856 he had written to Bridge, expressing great hope that all would yet turn out well. But so rapidly did the horizon blacken, that later in the same year he declared that "an actual fissure" seemed to him to be opening between the two sections of the country. In January, 1857:—
"I regret that you think so doubtfully of the prospects of the Union; for I should like well enough to hold on to the old thing. And yet I must confess that I sympathize to a large extent with the Northern feeling, and think it is about time for us to make a stand. If compelled to choose, I go for the North. New England is quite as large a lump of earth as my heart can really take in…. However, I have no kindred with nor leaning toward the Abolitionists."
He felt, no doubt, that the vital principle of The Union from the beginning had been compromise, mutual concession, and if it was to be severed, preferred that it should be peacefully. Still, his moods and wishes varied as did those of many careful watchers at that time; and he saw too clearly the arguments on either side to hold fixedly to one course. In the December after his return, secession began; and for more than a year following he could not fix his attention upon literary matters. He wrote little, not even his journal, as Mrs. Hawthorne has told us, until 1862. Accustomed to respond accurately to every influence about him, with that sensitized exterior of receptive imagination which overlay the fixed substance of personal character,—so that, as we have seen, even a change of climate left its impress on his productions,—it was not strange that the emotions of horror and pain, the passion of hate, the splendid heroism which charged the whole atmosphere about him, now, should absorb his whole sensibility, and paralyze his imagination. It was no time for quiet observation or creative revery. A new era had broken upon us, ushered by the wild din of trumpet and cannon, and battle-cry; an era which was to form new men, and shape a new generation. He must pause and listen to the agonies of this birth, striving vainly to absorb the commotion into himself and to let it subside into clear visions of the future. No hope! He could not pierce the war-smoke to any horizon of better things. He who had schooled himself so unceasingly to feel with utmost intensity the responsibility of each soul for any violence or crime of others, could not cancel the fact of multitudinous murder by any hypothesis of prospective benefit. Thus, in the midst of that magnificent turbulence, he was like the central quiet of a whirlpool: all the fierce currents met there, and seemed to pause,—but only seemed. Full of sympathy as he was for his fellows, and agitated at times by the same warlike impulses, he could not give himself rein as they did, nor dared to raise any encouraging strain in his writing, as others felt that they might freely do. His Puritan sense of justice, refined by descent and wedded to mercy, compelled him to weigh all carefully, to debate long and compassionately. But meantime the popular sense of justice—that same New England sentiment, of which his own was a development—cared nothing for these fine considerations, and Hawthorne was generally condemned by it as being warped by his old Democratic alliances into what was called treason. Nevertheless, he was glad to be in his native land, and suffer bitter criticism here,—if that were all that could be granted,—rather than to remain an unmolested exile.
An article which he contributed to the "Atlantic Monthly" in July, 1862, gives a faint inkling of his state of mind at this time; but nothing illustrates more clearly, either, the reserve which he always claimed lay behind his seemingly most frank expressions in print. For he there gives the idea of something like coldness in his attitude touching the whole great tragedy. But those who saw him daily, and knew his real mood, have remembered how deeply his heart was shaken by it. Fortunately, there are one or two epistolary proofs of the degree in which his sympathy with his own side of the struggle sometimes mastered him. He used to say that he only regretted that his son was too young and himself too old to admit of either of them entering the army; and just after the first battle of Bull Run he wrote to Mr. Lowell, at Cambridge, declining an invitation:—