Chapter I: Front Matter

HAWTHORNE AND HIS CIRCLE

By Julian Hawthorne

ILLUSTRATED

[IMAGE: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)]

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Inheritance of friendships--Gracious giants--My own good fortune--My father the central figure--What did his gift to me cost him?--A revelation in Colorado--Privileges make difficulties--Lights and shadows of memory--An informal narrative--Contrast between my father's life and mine

I

Value of dates--My aunt Lizzie's efforts--My father's decapitation--My mother's strong-box--The spirit of The Scarlet Letter--The strain of imaginative composition--My grandmother Hawthorne's death--Infantile indifference to calamity--The children's plays and books--The house on Mall Street--Scarlet fever--The study on the third floor--The haunted mahogany writing-desk--The secret drawers--The upright Egyptian--Mr. Pickwick--My father in 1850--The flowered writing-gown, and the ink butterfly--Driving the quill pen--The occupants of the second floor--Aunt Louisa and Aunt Ebe--The dowager Mrs. Hawthorne--I kick my aunt Lizzie--The kittens and the great mystery--The greatest book of the age

II

Horatio Bridge's "I-told-you-so"--What a house by the sea might have done--Unknown Lenox--The restlessness of youth--The Unpardonable Sin and the Death--less Man--The little red house--Materials of culture--Our best playmates--The mystery of Mrs. Peter's dough--Our intellectual hen-fishing for poultry--Yacht-building--Swimming with one foot on the ground--Shipwreck--Our playfellow the brook--Tanglewood--Nuts--Giants and enchanters--Coasting--Wet noses, dark eyes, ambrosial breath-My first horseback ride--Herman Melville's stories--Another kind of James--The thunder-storm--Yearning ladies and melancholy-sinners--Hindlegs--Probable murder--"I abominate the sight of it!"--The peril of Tanglewood--The truth of fiction--An eighteen-months' work--We leave five cats behind

III

Chariots of delight--West Newton--Raw American life--Baby's fingers--Our cousin Benjamin's untoward head--Our uncle Horace--His vacuum--A reformer's bristles--Grace Greenwood's first tears--The heralding of Kossuth--The decorated engine--The chief incident of the reception--Blithedale and Brook Farm--Notes from real life--Rough draughts--Paths of composition--The struggle with the Pensioner--Hawthorne's method--The invitation of Concord--Four wooden walls and a roof--Mr. Alcott's aesthetic carpentering--Appurtenances of "The Wayside"--Franklin Pierce for President--"The most homeless people in the world"

IV

A transfigured cattle-pen--Emerson the hub of Concord--His incorrigible modesty--Grocery-store sages--To make common men feel more like Emerson than he did--His personal appearance--His favorite gesture--A glance like the reveille of a trumpet--The creaking boots--"The muses are in the woods"--Emerson could not read Hawthorne--Typical versus individual--Benefit from child-prattle--Concord-grape Bull--Sounds of distant battle--Politics, sociology, and grape-culture--The great white fence--Richard Henry Stoddard--A country youth of genius--Whipple's Attic salt--An unwritten romance--The consulship retires literature--Louisa's tragedy--Hard hit--The spiritual sphere of good men--Nearer than in the world--The return of the pilgrim

V

A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the carpenter--W. D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An aristocratic acrobat--Speech that beggars eulogy--The boots of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The last infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The coquetry of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The thirsty island--Gloomy English comforts--Systematic geniality--A standing puzzle--The respirator--Scamps, fools, mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of sailor-men--"Is this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm of insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle against dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-, Irish-, and Scotchman--An Englishman owns his country--A contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable gateway--Years of memorable trifles

VI

Patricians and plebeians--The discomforts of democracy--Varieties of equality--Social rights of beggars--The coming peril--Being dragged to the rich--Frankness of vulgarity and hopelessness of destitution--Villages rooted in the landscape--Evanescence of the spiritual and survival of the material--"Of Bebbington the holy peak"--The Old Yew of Eastham--Malice--prepense interest--History and afternoon tea--An East--Indian Englishman--The merchantman sticks in the mud--A poetical man of the world--Likeness to Longfellow--Real breakfasts--Heads and stomachs--A poet-pugilist--Clean-cut, cold, gentle, dry--A respectable female atheist--The tragedy of the red ants--Voluptuous struggles--A psalm of praise

VII

Life in Rock Park--Inconvenient independence of lodgings--The average man--"How many gardeners have you got?"--Shielded by rose-leaves of culture and refinement--The English middle class--Prejudice, complacency, and Burke's Peerage--Never heard of Tennyson or Browning--Satisfaction in the solid earth--A bond of fellowship--A damp, winding, verdurous street--The parent of stucco villas--Inactivity of individual conscience--A plateau and a cliff--dwelling--"The Campbells are Coming!"--Sortes Virgilianae--A division in the family--Precaution against famine--English praying and card-playing--Exercise for mind and body--Knight-errantry--Sentimentality and mawkishness--The policeman and the cobbler--A profound truth--Fireworks by lamplight--Mr. Squarey and Mrs. Roundey--Sandford and Merton--The ball of jolly

VIII

Cataclysmic adventures--On the trail of dazzling fortunes--"Lovely, but reprehensible Madham"--The throne saves the artist--English robin redbreast--A sad and weary old man--"Most indelicate woman I've ever known"--Perfectly chaste--Something human stirred dimly--"She loves me; she loves me!"--The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown--Portentous and thundering title--Honest English simplicity--"The spirit lacking"--Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin--A famous and charming woman of genius--Deep and wide well of human sympathy--The whooping-cough

IX

Two New England consciences--Inexhaustible faith and energy--Deep and abiding love of England--"'How the Water Comes Down at Lodore"--"He took an' he let go"--Naked mountains--The unsentimental little quadruped--The human element in things sticks--The coasts of England--A string of sleepy donkeys--Unutterable boy-thoughts--Grins and chuckles like an ogress---Hideous maternal parody---The adorable inverted bell-glass--Strange things happen in the world--An ominous clouding of the water--Something the world has never known--Overweening security--An admonition not to climb too high--How vice may become virtue by repetition--Corporal Blair's chest--Black-Bottle Cardigan--Called to Lisbon

X

If there were boarding-houses in paradise--Blodgett, the delight of mankind--Solomon foresaw her--A withering retort--A modest, puny poise about her--Hidden thoughts derived from Mother Eve and Grecian Helen--The feminine council that ruled the Yankee captains--Bonds of fraternity, double-riveted and copper-fastened--Through the looking-glass--Men only of the manliest sort--The lady-paramount--Hands which were true works of art--Retained his dignity without putting it on--Sighed heavily over my efforts--Unctuous M. Huguenin--"From dawn to eve I fell"--The multum-in-parvo machine--"Beauty and the Beast"--Frank Channing--"Blood-and water!"--A lapful of Irish stew

XI

Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you marry that woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--"The worst book anybody ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I ever saw"--A great deal of the feminine in Reade--Fire, pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A philosophical library in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily and voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the _os-rotundas_ sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived--Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks through the mind of a third person--A delightful Irishman--Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed--Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine will always rest on it

XII

Talked familiarly with kings and queens--Half-witted girl who giggled all the time--It gnawed me terribly--A Scotch terrier named Towsey--A sentiment of diplomatic etiquette--London as a physical entity--Ladies in low-necked dresses--An elderly man like a garden-spider--Into the bowels of the earth--The inner luminousness of genius--Isolated and tragic situation--"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"--The great, wild, mysterious Borrow--Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and awful--"Ma'am, you expose yourself!"--Plane, spokeshave, gouge, and chisel--"I-passed-the-Lightning"--Parallel-O-grams--A graduate of Antioch--"Continual cursing"--A catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable sisterhood"--"In truth I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide-awake of these things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at Folkestone for France

XIII

Old-Homesickness--The Ideal and the Real--A beautiful but perilous woman with a past--The Garden of Eden a Montreal ice-palace--Confused mountain of family luggage--Poplars for lances--Miraculous crimson comforters--Rivers of human gore--Curling mustachios and nothing to do--Odd behavior of grown people--Venus, the populace, and the MacDaniels--The happiness to die in Paris--Lived alone with her constellations--"O'Brien's Belt"--A hotel of peregrinations--Sitting up late--Attempted assassination--My murderer--An old passion reawakened--Italian shells and mediaeval sea-anemones--If you were in the Garden of Eden--An umbrella full of napoleons--Was Byron an Esquimau?

XIV

Our unpalatial palace--"Cephas Giovanni"--She and George Combe turned out to be right--A rousing temper--Bright Titian hair--"All that's left of him"--The pyramidal man of destiny--The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts--Clausilia Bubigunia--Jabez Hogg and the microscope--A stupendous surprise--A lifetime in fourteen months--My father's jeremiades--"Thank Heaven, there is such a thing as whitewash!"--"Terrible lack of variety in the old masters"--"The brazen trollop that she is!"--Several distinct phases of feeling--Springs of creative imagination roused--The Roman fever--A sad book--Effects of the death-blow--The rest is silence

XV

The Roman carnival in three moods--Apples of Sodom--Poor, battered, wilted, stained hearts--A living protest and scourge--Dulce est desipere in loco--A rollicking world of happy fools--Endless sunshine of some sort--Greenwich Fair was worth a hundred of it--They thundered past, never drawing rein--"Senza moccolo!"--Nothing more charming and strange could be imagined--Girls surprised in the midst of dressing themselves--A Unitarian clergyman with his fat wife--Apparent license under courteous restraint--He laughed and pelted and was pelted--William Story, as vivid as when I saw him last--A too facile power--A deadly shadow gliding close behind--Set afire by his own sallies--"Thy face is like thy mother's, my fair child!"--Cleopatra in the clay--"Wer nie sein Brod mit thranen ass."

XVI

Drilled in Roman history--Lovely figures made of light and morning--What superb figures!--The breath and strength of immeasurable antiquity--Treasures coming direct from dead hands into mine--A pleasant sound of coolness and refreshment--Receptacles of death now dedicated to life--The Borghese is a forest of Ardennes--Profound and important communings--A smiling deceiver--Of an early-rising habit--Hauling in on my slack--A miniature cabinet magically made Titanic--"If I had a murder on my conscience"--None can tell the secret origin of his thoughts--A singularly beautiful young woman--She actually ripped the man open--No leagues of chivalry needed in Rome--A resident army--Five foot six--Corsets and padding--She was wounded in the house of her friends

XVII

Miss Lander makes a bust--The twang of his native place--Wholly unlike anybody else--Wise, humorous Sarah Clarke--Back to the Gods and the Fleas--Horace Mann's statue--Miss Bremer and the Tarpeian Rock--"I was in a state of some little tremor"--Mrs. Jameson and Ruskin--Most thorough-going of the classic tragedies--A well-grown calf--An adventure in Monte Testaccio--A vision of death--A fantastic and saturnine genius--A pitch-black place--Illuminations and fireworks--The Faun--Enjoying Rome--First impressions--Lalla's curses

XVIII

In Othello's predicament--Gaetano--Crystals and snail-shells--Broad, flagstone pavements--Fishing-rods and blow-pipes--Ghostly yarns--Conservative effects of genius--An ideal bust and a living one--The enigma of spiritualism--A difficult combination to overthrow--The dream-child and the Philistine--Dashing and plunging this way and that--Teresa screamed for mercy--Grapes and figs and ghostly voices--My father would have settled there--Kirkup the necromancer--A miraculous birth--A four-year-old medium--The mysterious touch--An indescribable horror--Not even a bone of her was left--Providence takes very long views

XIX

Burnt Sienna--The Aquila Nera--A grand, noble, gentle creature--The most beautiful woman in the world--Better friends than ever--A shadow brooded--Boys are whole-souled creatures--Franklin Pierce--Miriam, Hilda, Kenyon, Donatello--The historian of the Netherlands--When New England makes a man--The spell of Trevi--An accession of mishaps--My father's mustache--Three steps of stone, the fourth, death--Havre, Redcar, Bath, London, Liverpool

ILLUSTRATIONS

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE (From a crayon drawing by Samuel Rowse)

BIRTHPLACE OF NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AT SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS

HERMAN MELVILLE

JAMES T. FIELDS

THE WAYSIDE (Showing Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife)

EDWIN P. WHIPPLE

JAMES T. FIELDS, NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, AND WILLIAM D. TICKNOR

RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES

ROBERT BROWNING

FRANCIS BANNOCH

REV. WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING, 1855

MARIA MITCHELL

WILLIAM WETMORE STORY

PENCIL SKETCHES IN ITALY, BY MRS. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

THE MARBLE FAUN

HIRAM POWERS