Home Life of Great Authors

by Hattie Tyng Griswold

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

"Come to Concord," wrote Ellery Channing to Hawthorne once upon a time; "Emerson is away, and nobody here to bore you;"—which sentence contains a gentle hint to the posterity of the two most distinguished men of letters America has produced that even the mystic and the seer sometimes palled upon the appetites of his personal friends. If any man could be supposed to be a hero to his valet, that man was surely Emerson; but his gifted neighbor seems not to have had any strong relish for his society. Neither did Hawthorne really enjoy Thoreau, who would seem to have been a sufficiently original person to have interested him, merely as a study of character. But it does not appear that Hawthorne was ever particularly fond of the society of men of letters, even though they were also men of genius. He refused to go to the Saturday Club of Authors, but would play cards with sea-captains in the smoking-room of his boarding-house in Liverpool, evening after evening. Indeed, he liked the piquant flavor of what is commonly called low society, when he required any society outside his home, better than that which would have seemed more adapted to his taste. We mean simply by this the society of back-woodsmen, sailors, laborers, and old hard-headed farmers of New England stock, with their strong provincial dialect.

Mr. Emerson himself liked the raciness of the conversation of such men, and, indeed, we think almost all men of genius have something of the same taste. When we read what Mrs. Hawthorne says of the manner of conversation between her husband and Emerson, it can scarcely be considered remarkable that Hawthorne should not have cared to confine himself to the society of the sage. She says, speaking of Hawthorne:—

"Mr. Emerson delights in him; he talks to him all the time, and Mr. Hawthorne looks answers. He seems to fascinate Emerson. Whenever he comes to see him he takes him away, so that no one may interrupt him in his close and dead-set attack upon his ear."

There is a one-sidedness to a conversation of this nature which might well weary a person in the body; and only a disembodied spirit, it may be surmised, could thoroughly enjoy it. A fine thing to do would be to put two of those great conversationalists against each other, as was sometimes done with Sydney Smith and Macaulay. It is said that the two would sit glaring at each other and maintain perfect silence; whereas either one of them apart from the other would discourse for three hours without taking breath. Imagine the horrible agony of those among the auditors who were not interested in the subject of the oration!—and there must always have been some among the number so situated.

One remembers how Shelley got rid of the old woman down in Conway, and wonders why the ruse was never tried upon Macaulay by some of his victims. Shelley, it is said, was once riding in a stage in that region, and the only passenger beside himself was an old woman with two huge baskets filled with onions and cabbage respectively. She was huge herself and much incumbered with fat, and the day was excessively warm. Shelley was one of those delicate mortals who have been known to "die of a rose in aromatic pains," and after a while the presence of the old woman nearly drove him to distraction. He pretended that it had quite done so, and suddenly throwing himself into the bottom of the stage he glared at the old woman and shouted:—

"For God's sake let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the death of kings:
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,—
All murdered."

Before the last two words—which he rendered with more than an actor's effect—were fairly out of his mouth, the old woman by her shrieks had summoned the guard, and was released from the company of the madman. Shelley was often induced by his friends to show them how he got rid of the old woman, and the exhibition always called for uproarious applause. There is a hint in it for any well-bred company who may be bored to the point of extinction by a distinguished member. The only wonder is that in some cases the sudden madness is not real rather than assumed.

Hawthorne was eminently capable of being bored to this point of desperation, and his mother and elder sister saved themselves from any danger of this kind by voluntarily living the lives of recluses. Julian Hawthorne tells us:—