Chapter VI: Latest and Posthumous Writings

_OUR OLD HOME_, _NOTE-BOOKS_, _DOLLIVER ROMANCE_

_Our Old Home_ is a volume of twelve chapters on English life and experiences. Acute, frank, sympathetic, modestly phrased, abounding in humor, it may fairly be accounted one of the best of Hawthorne’s works. The English are said to have been disturbed by a number of the comments on their character and manners. If so, they must be as touchy as Americans. _Our Old Home_ contains nothing that should offend, unless indeed it be an offence to speak of one’s neighbor in any terms not those of unmitigated eulogy. Hawthorne noted certain differences between the national types of the two countries and gave an account of them. But of any disposition to laud his own people at the expense of their British cousins, the book contains not a trace.

_Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne_ is the raw material out of which was fashioned such a charming and perfect literary study as _Our Old Home_. It is idle to dispute over the question whether the fragmentary journalizings of an eminent author should or should not be given to the public. They will always be given to the public, and the public will always be grateful for them, even though it has no deeper cause for gratitude than that involved in satisfaction of mere curiosity. At all events, the passion for looking into the work-shop of a great artist cannot be overcome. Perhaps this most trivial form of hero-worship deserves countenance.

The _Note-Books_ (English, Italian, and American) bear the same relation to _Our Old Home_ that a man talking with his most trusted friend bears to that same man when talking with an agreeable chance acquaintance. In the one case he is wholly unguarded, in the other he keeps himself in check even at the moment he seems most frank and expansive.

_The Dolliver Romance_ is one of a group of studies for an elaborate narrative in which Hawthorne proposed to trace the fortunes of an American family back to those of its English forebears. The idea of connecting the obscure New England branch of the house with the proud Old-World descendants by some vague claim on the ancestral estate is almost too common in fiction. But Hawthorne seems to have been drawn towards it by his life in the consulate at Liverpool, where he had continually to check the exuberance of misguided fellow-countrymen who had appropriated, in mind, not a few of the finest estates in England, and only lacked faint encouragement to attempt entering on actual possession.

The idea of the Bloody Footstep was taken from a tradition connected with Smithell’s Hall in Bolton-le-Moors, and Hawthorne went to see what purported to be the mark made in the stone step by the unhappy man about whose mysterious history the romance gathers. The quest and discovery of an elixir of life is in itself a threadbare motive, but could hardly have been commonplace under Hawthorne’s treatment.

He was not to complete his design. The four versions of the story, _The Dolliver Romance_, _The Ancestral Footstep_, _Septimius Felton_, and _Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret_, furnish another glimpse into Hawthorne’s literary studio, though we are warned not to infer that he always worked in the way the existence of these fragments might suggest.

* * * * *

Hawthorne was the most gifted of our American romancers. In a certain sense his field was a narrow one, but the soil was rich, and there was magic in his husbandry. He himself once declared that he never knew what patriotism was until he met an Englishman; that he was not an American, New England was as big a lump of earth as he could hold in his heart. The defect (if indeed it be a defect) was one of the sources of his power. Hawthorne did indeed love New England, but to suppose that he loved it with a blind and uncritical love is wholly to misunderstand both the man and his work. He was the genius of his little world. He knew its poetry and its prose, its mystery, charm, beauty, and its repellent and sordid features. New England will have no profounder interpreter, though it may be that as the superficial characteristics of the people change, his transcripts of life will increasingly take on the qualities of pure romance.

FOOTNOTES:

[38] Enlarged edition, 1854.

[39] Published in England under the absurd title of
_Transformation_. Hawthorne wrote to Henry Bright: ‘Smith and
Elder do take strange liberties with the titles of books. I
wanted to call it the _Marble Faun_, but they insisted on
_Transformation_ which will lead the reader to expect a sort
of pantomime.’

[40] Letter to Horatio Bridge, May 26, 1861.

[41] Henry James: _Terminations_.