This, to me, conveyed only the idea of physical disaster, and it was with a sentiment of relief, commensurate with the contempt inspired by such an explanation, that I was given to understand that it was the great author's unselfish effort in behalf of his old college comrade and life-long friend, that was supposed to imply a state of moral declension fitly indicated by the sinister word.
It was thus that men and women, full of the cheap patriotism of the time, and puffed up with a sort of loyal egotism that blinded them to the possibilities of honest purpose in any whose views on politics and public affairs varied never so slightly from their accepted standard of right, ventured to condemn what they were constitutionally incapable of judging with either coolness or fair appreciation.
The "Life of Franklin Pierce" is by no means a great book, and neither the subject nor its treatment entitles it to a place among the immortal works that preceded and followed it; but to those of us who knew and loved the writer, and to those who through his books got some glimpses of the singular purity of his moral nature, a quality of friendship that excludes the idea of selfish interest seems its author's only and sufficient motive.
When the storm of civil war broke upon us, these worthy critics flung themselves with tongue, or pen, or sword—chiefly with tongue—into the good cause, and were scandalized at the vision of one who would fain have dreamed while they, after their various methods, were fighting; of a poet so far aloft in the regions of ideal fancy that the confused voices of battle well-nigh failed to reach him. And yet, in the words of one of their own writers,
"There was but one man living whom the country could so ill afford to lose as this strange, wayward, fitful, unreasonable poet and dreamer, who sneered at the war, and at the great nation that waged it, with the pettishness of a spoiled child."
But the charge that Hawthorne sneered at the righteous war, or, far worse, at his country, is full of an injustice which seems more bitter because it comes from one whose hearty admiration of the Author should have lifted him to a clearer appreciation of the Man in his purity and lofty patriotism.
The writer concludes the article from which I have quoted, and which, in keen analysis and generous, literary judgment, is rarely equalled by any of Hawthorne's reviewers, with these and like ill-considered words:—
"Wherever he turned his weary steps, there stood in his path the genius of the time, not beautiful, not romantic, to his eyes; not even grand—but stern enough and in grim earnest, demanding of him what he could not give,—the heart and voice of an American citizen in the hour of America's danger."
The writer forgot, or, blinded by strong feeling, failed to perceive, that the silence which, with him as with hundreds of good and earnest men, would indeed have indicated a fatal lack of patriotic emotion, was in the case of Hawthorne only the inevitable shrinking of a rare and sensitive spirit from contact with the awful realities of conflict.
When the "Artist of the Beautiful" descended from the serene atmosphere, where his lofty spiritual nature had its true home and highest sphere of action, and devoted his delicate gifts to the useful mysteries of watch-making, the result, while eminently satisfactory to his old employer and well-wisher, the jeweller, and doubtless of blessed effect on the poor artist's purse, was disastrous in loss to the world of thought, and in its influence on his better and real self.