Literary and Social Essays

by George William Curtis

It is not strange, certainly, that a man such as has been described, of a morbid shyness, the path of whose genius diverged always out of the sun into the darkest shade, and to whom human beings were merely psychological phenomena, should have been accounted ungenial, and sometimes even hard, cold, and perverse. From the bent of his intellectual temperament it happens that in his simplest and sweetest passages he still seems to be studying and curiously observing, rather than sympathizing. You cannot help feeling constantly that the author is looking askance both at his characters and you, the reader; and many a young and fresh mind is troubled strangely by his books, as if it were aware of a half-Mephistophelean smile upon the page. Nor is this impression altogether removed by the remarkable familiarity of his personal disclosures. There was never a man more shrinkingly retiring, yet surely never was an author more naively frank. He is willing that you should know all that a man may fairly reveal of himself. The great interior story he does not tell, of course, but the Introduction to the Mosses from an Old Manse, the opening chapter of The Scarlet Letter, and the Consular Experiences, with much of the rest of Our Old Home, are as intimate and explicit chapters of autobiography as can be found. Nor would it be easy to find anywhere a more perfect idyl than that introductory chapter of the Mosses. Its charm is perennial and indescribable; and why should it not be, since it was written at a time in which, as he says, "I was happy?" It is, perhaps, the most softly-hued and exquisite work of his pen. So the sketch of "The Custom-house", although prefatory to that most tragically powerful of romances,

The Scarlet Letter, is an incessant play of the shyest and most airy humor. It is like the warbling of bobolinks before a thunder-burst. How many other men, however unreserved with the pen, would be likely to dare to paint, with the fidelity of Teniers and the simplicity of Fra Angelico, a picture of the office and the companions in which and with whom they did their daily work? The surveyor of customs in the port of Salem treated the town of Salem, in which he lived and discharged his daily task, as if it had been, with all its people, as vague and remote a spot as the town of which he was about to treat in the story. He commented upon the place and the people as modern travellers in Pompeii discuss the ancient town. It made a great scandal. He was accused of depicting with unpardonable severity worthy folks, whose friends were sorely pained and indignant. But he wrote such sketches as he wrote his stories. He treated his companions as he treated himself and all the personages in history or experience with which he dealt, merely as phenomena to be analyzed and described, with no more private malice or personal emotion than the sun, which would have photographed them, warts and all.

Thus it was that the great currents of human sympathy never swept him away. The character of his genius isolated him, and he stood aloof from the common interests. Intent upon studying men in certain aspects, he cared little for man; and the high tides of collective emotion among his fellows left him dry and untouched. So he beholds and describes the generous impulse of humanity with sceptical courtesy rather than with hopeful cordiality.

He does not chide you if you spend effort and life itself in the ardent van of progress, but he asks simply, "Is six so much better than half a dozen?" He will not quarrel with you if you expect the millennium to-morrow. He only says, with that glimmering smile, "So soon?" Yet in all this there was no shadow of spiritual pride. Nay, so far from this, that the tranquil and pervasive sadness of all Hawthorne's writings, the kind of heartache that they leave behind, seem to spring from the fact that his nature was related to the moral world, as his own Donatello was to the human. "So alert, so alluring, so noble", muses the heart as we climb the Apennines towards the tower of Monte Beni; "alas! is he human?" it whispers, with a pang of doubt.

How this directed his choice of subjects, and affected his treatment of them, when drawn from early history, we have already seen. It is not, therefore, surprising, that the history into which he was born interested him only in the same way.

When he went to Europe as consul, Uncle Tom's Cabin was already published, and the country shook with the fierce debate which involved its life. Yet eight years later Hawthorne wrote with calm ennui, "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land." Is crime never romantic, then, until distance ennobles it? Or were the tragedies of Puritan life so terrible that the imagination could not help kindling, while the pangs of the plantation are superficial and commonplace? Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, and Thackeray were able to find a shadow even in "merrie England". But our great romancer looked at the American life of his time with these marvellous eyes, and could see only monotonous sunshine. That the devil, in the form of an elderly man clad in grave and decent attire, should lead astray the saints of Salem village, two centuries ago, and confuse right and wrong in the mind of Goodman Brown, was something that excited his imagination, and produced one of his weirdest stories. But that the same devil, clad in a sombre sophism, was confusing the sentiment of right and wrong in the mind of his own countrymen he did not even guess. The monotonous sunshine disappeared in the blackest storm. The commonplace prosperity ended in tremendous war. What other man of equal power, who was not intellectually constituted precisely as Hawthorne was, could have stood merely perplexed and bewildered, harassed by the inability of positive sympathy, in the vast conflict which tosses us all in its terrible vortex?

In political theories and in an abstract view of war men may differ. But this war is not to be dismissed as a political difference. Here is an attempt to destroy the government of a country, not because it oppressed any man, but because its evident tendency was to secure universal justice under law. It is, therefore, a conspiracy against human nature. Civilization itself is at stake; and the warm blood of the noblest youth is everywhere flowing in as sacred a cause as history records—flowing not merely to maintain a certain form of government, but to vindicate the rights of human nature. Shall there not be sorrow and pain, if a friend is merely impatient or confounded by it—if he sees in it only danger or doubt, and not hope for the right—or if he seem to insinuate that it would have been better if the war had been avoided, even at that countless cost to human welfare by which alone the avoidance was possible?

Yet, if the view of Hawthorne's mental constitution which has been suggested be correct, this attitude of his, however deeply it may be regretted, can hardly deserve moral condemnation. He knew perfectly well that if a man has no ear for music he had better not try to sing. But the danger with such men is that they are apt to doubt if music itself be not a vain delusion. This danger Hawthorne escaped. There is none of the shallow persiflage of the sceptic in his tone, nor any affectation of cosmopolitan superiority. Mr. Edward Dicey, in his interesting reminiscences of Hawthorne, published in Macmillan's Magazine, illustrates this very happily.

"To make his position intelligible, let me repeat an anecdote which
was told me by a very near friend of his and mine, who had heard it
from President Pierce himself. Frank Pierce had been, and was to the
day of Hawthorne's death, one of the oldest of his friends. At the
time of the Presidential election of 1856, Hawthorne, for once, took
part in politics, wrote a pamphlet in favor of his friend, and took
a most unusual interest in his success. When the result of the
nomination was known, and Pierce was President-elect, Hawthorne was
among the first to come and wish him joy. He sat down in the room
moodily and silently, as he was wont when anything troubled him; then,
without speaking a word, he shook Pierce warmly by the hand, and at
last remarked, 'Ah, Frank, what a pity!' The moment the victory was
won, that timid, hesitating mind saw the evils of the successful
course—the advantages of the one which had not been followed. So it
was always. Of two lines of action, he was perpetually in doubt which
was the best; and so, between the two, he always inclined to letting
things remain as they are.
"Nobody disliked slavery more cordially than he did; and yet the
difficulty of what was to be done with the slaves weighed constantly
upon his mind. He told me once that, while he had been consul at
Liverpool, a vessel arrived there with a number of negro sailors, who
had been brought from slave States, and would, of course, be enslaved
again on their return. He fancied that he ought to inform the men of
the fact, but then he was stopped by the reflection—who was to
provide for them if they became free? and, as he said, with a sigh,
'while I was thinking, the vessel sailed.' So, I recollect, on the old
battle-field of Manassas, in which I strolled in company with
Hawthorne, meeting a batch of runaway slaves—weary, foot-sore,
wretched, and helpless beyond conception; we gave them food and wine,
some small sums of money, and got them a lift upon a train going
northward; but not long afterwards Hawthorne turned to me with the
remark, 'I am not sure we were doing right after all. How can these
poor beings find food and shelter away from home?' Thus this ingrained
and inherent doubt incapacitated him from following any course
vigorously. He thought, on the whole, that Wendell Phillips and Lloyd
Garrison and the Abolitionists were in the right, but then he was
never quite certain that they were not in the wrong after all; so that
his advocacy of their cause was of a very uncertain character. He saw
the best, to alter slightly the famous Horatian line, but he never
could quite make up his mind whether he altogether approved of its
wisdom, and therefore followed it but falteringly.
"'Better to bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of,'
"expressed the philosophy to which Hawthorne was thus borne
imperceptibly. Unjustly, but yet not unreasonably, he was looked upon
as a pro-slavery man, and suspected of Southern sympathies. In
politics he was always halting between two opinions; or, rather,
holding one opinion, he could never summon up his courage to adhere
to it and it only."

The truth is that his own times and their people and their affairs were just as shadowy to him as those of any of his stories, and his mind held the same curious, half-wistful poise among all the conflicts of principle and passion around him, as among those of which he read and mused. If you ask why this was so—how it was that the tragedy of an old Italian garden, or the sin of a lonely Puritan parish, or the crime of a provincial judge, should so stimulate his imagination with romantic appeals and harrowing allegories, while either it did not see a Carolina slave-pen, or found in it only a tame prosperity—you must take your answer in the other question, why he did not weave into any of his stories the black and bloody thread of the Inquisition. His genius obeyed its law. When he wrote like a disembodied intelligence of events with which his neighbors' hearts were quivering—when the same half-smile flutters upon his lips in the essay About War Matters, sketched as it were upon the battle-field, as in that upon Fire Worship, written in the rural seclusion of the mossy Manse—ah me! it is Donatello, in his tower of Monte Beni, contemplating with doubtful interest the field upon which the flower of men are dying for an idea. Do you wonder, as you see him and hear him, that your heart, bewildered, asks and asks again, "Is he human? Is he a man?"