JULIAN HAWTHORNE
“NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Julian Hawthorne HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1846
June 22, Monday: In Salem, Massachusetts, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne gave birth to a 2d child, Julian Hawthorne. Initially this apparently unwanted or resented child would not be named: for at least the first eight months his mother and father would refer to him merely as “bundlebreech” (on a following screen is Nathaniel Hawthorne, as depicted in this year in crayon and chalk on paper by Eastman Johnson).
Benjamin Robert Haydon, would-be redeemer of British art, creator of grand agendas, his magnum opus “The Anti-Slavery Convention” finally completed in a world which greeted it with a grand “ho-hum,” at the age of 61 wrote “Stretch me no longer on this rough world” and made in the journal he had been keeping for 38 years a blood-smeared entry: My soul aspires My spirit is wounded My hand fumbles My heart races My brain aches to burst My hand drops the impasto-laden brush HDT WHAT? INDEX
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My eyes wail hot tears I fail to shave, to wash to change my linen The glory of being a painter resides in one’s utter neglect by critics and public. * * * * I ask friend L—— for £100. We dine in the city on mutton, wine, and trifle. Laughter is a patina. O God, Thy will be done! He breaks the news: bad times prevent his advancing even a threepence. At home I drink much, the only time, my Mary says, she’s seen me so. The hottest, most airless summer on record, “a sultry month.” I do not sleep, except in fits. I stare like an idiot at Alfred. The paint on his face is cold gravy. I write to Lord Peel, Beaufort, and Brougham. Nothing avails. I burn more letters and papers, pack up my valuables, what might be sold as income — the drawings of Wellington, Wordsworth, my wife and dead children, plus a metal box containing journals — and carry all to Elizabeth Barrett. She’ll keep them from my creditors — she’s promised.
Miss Barrett, in purple, reclines on a sofa. (The evening is stifling.) Flush sleeps in her lap. She strokes him as she is speaking. I’m lost in a wish to sketch her, am abstracted rehearsing the line round her thin mouth, the cheek bones, the tendrils of hair scooping her temples.... “If only I could die,” I exclaim, “there’d be a subscription (I trust the English people) to support my family.” Monday, June 22, 1846. Stop at Riviere, the gun-maker, in Oxford Street. Purchase one of a pair of small pistols. At 9, I breakfast alone, then go to my painting-room. I write letters to my children, re-write my will, and sketch some final thoughts. As usual, I lock myself in. My daughter Mary, my confidante (more even than her mother) suspects nothing when she tries the door. She says (through the door) that she and her mother are going out. “Very well,” I say. Impulsively, I go to her, kiss her fervently, and linger. There is something I wish to say. But I walk away. I load the pistol, poise a lone straight-razor near. It’s 10:45. I face the door. Noise in the street. The hot air is a pall. I squeeze the trigger. Its small caliber deflects along the bone. Why, even now, must I fail! Desperate (for Mary will hear) I grab up the open razor and slice my throat, from ear to ear. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Finis. Benjamin Robert Haydon.
SUICIDE (The debts far exceeded any assets. The surviving widow and three children would need to be rescued in extremis by friends such as Sir Robert Peel, the Count d’Orsay, Mr. Justice Talfourd, and Lord Carlisle.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Famous Last Words:
“What school is more profitably instructive than the death-bed of the righteous, impressing the understanding with a convincing evidence, that they have not followed cunningly devised fables, but solid substantial truth.” — A COLLECTION OF MEMORIALS CONCERNING DIVERS DECEASED MINISTERS, Philadelphia, 1787 “The death bed scenes & observations even of the best & wisest afford but a sorry picture of our humanity. Some men endeavor to live a constrained life — to subject their whole lives to their will as he who said he might give a sign if he were conscious after his head was cut off — but he gave no sign Dwell as near as possible to the channel in which your life flows.” —Thoreau’s JOURNAL, March 12, 1853
1836 James Madison unsolicited comment “I always talk better lying down.”
1846 Benjamin Robert Haydon final entry in 38-year journal before “Stretch me no longer on this tough world. offing himself — Lear”
1848 John Quincy Adams had just voted “no” on war on Mexico “This is the last of earth. I am composed.”
1849 Washington Goode offered a cup of water before being “This is the last Cochituate water that I hanged in Boston shall ever drink.”
1849 Edgar Allan Poe in bad shape in Baltimore “Lord help my poor soul.”
1850 John Caldwell Calhoun unsolicited comment “The South! The poor South! God knows what will become of her.” ... other famous last words ... HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1851
Late October: Ellery Channing visited the Hawthornes in the “little red house” in Lenox, Massachusetts that had been their home since May 1850 and observed that wherever they moved, they found fault with the people among whom they settled (the Hawthornes were quarreling with their neighbors over rights to apples in an adjacent orchard, and three weeks after this visit they would relocate back to eastern Massachusetts.). He remarked that having written nine books had “greatly altered” Nathaniel Hawthorne into something of “a lion,” although an exceedingly reclusive one. He found Sophia Peabody Hawthorne not only to be no beauty but to be, in addition, fading at her age, and he found the two Hawthorne children, Una Hawthorne and Julian Hawthorne, to be not only ill-mannered but unhandsome.
NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT
Julian Hawthorne “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1852
February 8, Sunday: Herman Melville wrote to Julian Hawthorne: My Dear Master Julian I was equally surprised and delighted by the sight of your printed note. (At first I thought it was a circular (your father will tell you what that is)). I am very happy that I have a place in the heart of so fine a little fellow as you. You tell me that the snow in Newton is very deep. Well, it is still deeper here, I fancy. I went into the woods the other day, and got so deep into the drifts among the big hemlocks & maples that I thought I should stick fast there till Spring came, — a Snow Image. Remember me kindly to your good father, Master Julian, and Good Bye, and may Heaven always bless you, & may you be a good boy and become a great good man. Herman Melville
Feb. 8. Mrs Buttrick says that she has 5 cents for making a shirt, and that if she does her best she can make one in a day. It is interesting to see loads of hay coming down from the country now a days – (within a week) they make them very broad & low. They do not carry hay by RR yet. The spoils of up-country fields. A Mt of dried herbs. I had forgotten that there ever was so much grass as they prove.– And all these horses & oxen & cows thus are still fed on the last summer’s grass which has been dried! They still roam in the meads. One would think that some people regarded character in man as the botanist (regards character) in flowers– who says “Character characterem non antecellit nisi constantia.” but this is well explained, and so that it becomes applicable to man, by this parallel aphorism of Linnaeus – Character non est, ut genus fiat, sed ut genus noscatur.” It is apparently Fries who is made to say of his own system – or it may be Tuckerman who says it – that “By this key, I have not yet found that any plants, manifestly & by consent of all allied, are sundered.” Tuckerman says cunningly “If the rapt admirer of the wonders and the beauties of life & being might well come to learn of our knowledge the laws and the history of what he loves, let us remember that we have the best right to all the pleasure that he has discovered, and that we are not complete if we do not possess it all. Linnaeus was as hearty a lover & admirer of nature as if he had been nothing more”. Night before last our first rain for a long time– This afternoon the first crust to walk on. It is pleasant to walk over the fields raised a foot or more above their summer level – and the prospect is altogether new. Is not all music a hum more or less divine? I hear something new at every telegraph post. I have not got out of hearing of one before I here a new harp. Thoughts of different dates will not cohere. Carried a new cloak to Johnny Riaden? I found that the shanty was warmed by the simple social relations of the Irish. On sunday they come from the town & stand in the door way & so keep out the cold. One is not cold among his brothers and sisters. What if there is less fire on the hearth, if there is more in the heart. These Irish are not suceeding so ill after all– The little boy goes to the primary school and proves a forward boy there– And the mothers brother who has let himself in the village tells me that he takes the Flag of our Union – (if that is the paper edited by an Irishman). It is musical news to hear that Johnny does not love to be kept at home from school in deep snows. THOREAU ON THE IRISH In this winter often no apparent difference between rivers ponds & fields The French respected the Indians as a separate & independent people and speak of them & contrast themselves with them – as the English have never done. They not only went to war with them but they lived at home with HDT WHAT? INDEX
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them. There was a much less interval between them. *** A 20th-Century painting by Charles Ephraim Burchfield representing this thought “Is not all music a hum more or less divine? I hear something new at every telegraph post. I have not got out of hearing of one before I hear a new harp” displays a more modern type of telegraph-line insulator than actually had been in use during the 1850s:
AEOLIAN HARP
The line insulators in use during that earlier period would actually have looked more like the following preserved examples: HDT WHAT? INDEX
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July 28, Wednesday morning: Andrew Jackson Downing,1 his wife and her mother (Mrs. de Wint), his sister, his younger brother, and a Mrs. Wadsworth left the Downing residence “Highland Gardens” overlooking
Newburgh, New York2 to be picked up by the Hudson River steamboat Henry Clay. They were bound for Newport, Rhode Island. The vessel had left Albany at 7 A.M., and another vessel, the Armenia, had pulled away from the dock at roughly the same time. Initially the Armenia had taken the lead, but then the two passenger vessels began racing for the advantage which would result in getting to the various landings along the river earliest, so as to get the benefit of additional passengers and freight, and so as to be first at the cords of wood stacked at the landings. Just above Kingston the Henry Clay deliberately cut across the bow of the Armenia, splintering its larboard woodwork to the cheers of its passengers. Some passengers complained to the captain, as the Henry Clay was passing Yonkers, that the steam engine was getting so hot that they could not bear to walk past it amidships. Embers were shooting from the smokestack. When some of these embers fell on a stretched canvas covering, a fire broke out, within five minutes the situation became so hopeless that at Riverdale the captain rammed the vessel into the east bank of the river. The passengers at the stern could
1. He was in the process of regularizing the naming of varieties of apples, such as the Grand Sachem, the Maiden Blush, the Vittles and Drink, the Sine Qua Non, the Jonathan, and the Mouse. 2. Highland Gardens is long gone, but some Newburgh homes that Andrew Jackson Downing showing his influence do still remain. There is a Sherwin-Williams series of exterior house colors named in his honor. Newburgh’s Downing Park amounts to a smaller version of New York’s Central Park. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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not get past the flames amidships and as the fire consumed the vessel they were forced to leap into the deep, rapidly flowing river. The remains of Andrew Jackson Downing were recovered and he is buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery just north of Newburgh, New York.3
Maria Louisa Hawthorne drowned a few feet from the bank of the river.
Professor Jacob Whitman Bailey, his wife Maria Slaughter Bailey, their 17-year-old daughter Maria Whitman Bailey (who was ill), and their 9-year-old son William Whitman Bailey had been on a brief family outing. William managed to grab a floating wicker chair. Meanwhile, the father struggled to save his wife and daughter: Swimming with his feet, Jacob held his wife and daughter afloat until they could hold onto ropes hanging from the ship. A drowning woman pulled him under water. When he came up again the two Marias were gone and flames were everywhere. A stranger pulled him ashore.
The father could not believe his son was alive, until taken to him.4 The area would be crowded for days with New-Yorkers seeking to recover the bodies of loved ones:
In total there were some 70 or 80 fatalities.
July 28, Wednesday: Pm to Yellow pine Lake. Epilobium colorata road side just this side of Dennis Water lobelia is it that C. shows me? There is a yellowish light now from a low tufted yellowish broad leaved grass in fields that have been mown– A June like breezy air. The large shaped sagittaria out –a large crystalline white 3 petalled flower– Enough has not been said of 3.The uncompleted Mall in Washington DC would be taken over by W.D. Brackenridge and John Saul, who would of course continue until all appropriated funds were exhausted. 4. The family nurse “Aunt” Nancy Lewis, a manumitted slave, would need to take on the task of raising young William. While Robert E. Lee was Superintendent of West Point, from 1852 to 1855, his play companion was Robert E. Lee, Jr. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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the beauty of the shrub oak leaf Q. ilicifolia –of a thick firm texture for the most part injured by insects intended to last all winter –of a glossy green above & now silky smooth downy beneath –fit for a wreath or crown. The leaves of the chinquapin oak might be intermixed. Grass hoppers are very abundant –several to every square foot in some fields. I observed some leaves of woodbine which had not risen from the ground –turned a beautiful bright red –perhaps from heat & drought –though it was in a low wood.– This Ampelopsis Quinquefolia is in blossom– Is it identical with that about R W E’s posts which was in blossom July 13th– Aster radula? in J. P. Browns meadow Solidago Altissima? beyond the corner bridge out some days at least –but not rough hairy Golden rod & asters have fairly begun i.e. there are several kinds of each out. What is that slender hieracium or aster like plant in woods on Corner road with lanceolate sessile coarsely –feather veined leaves – sessile & remotely toothed –minute clustered imbricate buds? or flowers & buds? Panicled.
The evenings are now sensibly longer –& the cooler weather makes them improvable.
August 3, Tuesday: Louisa Hawthorne’s corpse, which had been recovered by divers, was buried. Waldo Emerson’s comment was:
Who knows which is the shortest & most excellent way out of the calamities of the present world?
That’s quite a comment to make over the corpse of a person who had needed to choose between the impossible alternatives of leaping into deep, swift-flowing waters, or being scorched to death! –Was Waldo venturing an opinion that Louisa, in her panic, leaping from the Henry Clay into those dark waters, had in effect been selecting the shorter and more excellent way, drowning, and deselecting the longer and less excellent way, burning? – I do not understand this. What the holy hell are we supposed to make of such a comment? HDT WHAT? INDEX
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December: According to Julian Hawthorne, “Thoreau’s hut was still standing on a level, pine-circled spot, near the margin.”
REPLICA OF CABIN
Here was the actual location in this year of Thoreau’s shanty, nowhere near the margin of Walden Pond:
(Since Julian was but six year of age at this time, hardly more than a rugrat, and since for more than three years already the structure actually had been standing in a field of the Brooks Clark farm on what is now Estabrook Road considerably to the north of the Concord town center, the above is clearly a flat lie based upon no HDT WHAT? INDEX
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personal knowledge whatever. This “pine-circled” near the margin of Walden Pond crap gives us a clear message that we cannot credit anything Julian tells us and must base our accounts exclusively on other and more reliably historical sources. –The guy would do hard time for some of his lies, ones that had direct financial consequences for people whom managed to impress by means of name-dropping.)
LIFE IS LIVED FORWARD BUT UNDERSTOOD BACKWARD? — NO, THAT’S GIVING TOO MUCH TO THE HISTORIAN’S STORIES. LIFE ISN’T TO BE UNDERSTOOD EITHER FORWARD OR BACKWARD.
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Julian Hawthorne HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1860
August 20, Monday: British and French land and naval forces pushed back the Taiping Chinese Christian Army at Shanghai.
During this night, 1,500 of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s men crossed in rowboats from Faro in Sicily to Favazzina on the Italian mainland.
Henry Thoreau surveyed, for Nathaniel Hawthorne, his estate on Lexington Road known as “The Wayside.” Julian Hawthorne, then 14 years of age, watched him, and on three occasions in his later life he would write about his having watched Thoreau during this survey. This survey shows two pieces of land and measures about 20 acres in all. Thoreau made a note that there was a hedge of osage orange. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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View Henry Thoreau’s personal working drafts of his surveys courtesy of AT&T and the Concord Free Public Library: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/Thoreau_Surveys.htm
(The official copy of this survey of course had become the property of the person or persons who had hired this Concord town surveyor to do their surveying work during the 19th Century. Such materials have yet to be recovered.)
View this particular personal working draft of a survey in fine detail: http://www.concordlibrary.org/scollect/Thoreau_Surveys/51a.htm [THOREAU MADE NO ENTRY IN HIS JOURNAL FOR AUGUST 20]
On three successive confabulations in later life, Julian Hawthorne would report about his having watched Thoreau survey on this day. We can see how utterly fabulistic these progressive confabulations were, by noticing that Julian backdates a survey made on August 20, 1860, after his return to Concord from Liverpool when he was at the age of 16 and about to enter Harvard College as a student of civil engineering, to the year 1852, while he was at the tender age of 8, prior to his sailing for Liverpool: Pasadena Star-News, December 12, 1923: “My first distinct recollection of him was when he surveyed our little estate at Concord, some twenty acres of hill, meadow and woodland. I saw the rather undersized, queer man coming along the road with his long steps carrying on his shoulder a queer instrument and looking very serious. I got down from the mulberry tree in which I was perched and watched his doing in silent absorption. Wherever he went I followed; neither of us spoke a word from first to last. Up the terraces with their apple trees, over the brow of the hill, into the wood and out again, down into the meadow to the brook, and so back to the house again. Finally my father came out and they talked a little, and my father paid him ten dollars, and Thoreau strode away, after remarking, with a glance at me, ‘That boy has more eyes than tongue.’”5
Dearborn Independent, August 20, 1927: “‘Good boy! sharp eyes, and no tongue!’ On that basis I was admitted to his friendship.”
THE MEMOIRS OF JULIAN HAWTHORNE (as reprocessed by his widow Edith Garrigues Hawthorne for Macmillan in 1938): “Once, when I was nearly seven years old, Thoreau came to the Wayside to make a survey of our land, bringing his surveying apparatus on his shoulder. I watched the short, dark, unbeautiful man with interest and followed him about, all over the place, never losing sight of a movement and never asking a question or uttering a word. The thing must have lasted a couple of hours; when we got back, Thoreau remarked to my father: ‘Good boy! Sharp eyes, and no tongue!’ On that basis I was admitted to his 5. It is extremely unlikely that Thoreau actually said anything at all like “That boy has more eyes than tongue,” because although one might imagine such a comment being made about one or another tongue-tied 8-year-old, this is not the sort of remark that anyone would ever make about any teener — no matter how sullen and comatose. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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friendship; a friendship or comradeship which began in 1852 and was to last until his death in 1862.6 In our walks about the country, Thoreau saw everything, and would indicate the invisible to me with a silent nod of the head. The brook that skirted the foot of our meadow was another treasure-house which he discovered to me, though he was too shy to companion me there; when he had given me a glimpse of Nature in her privacy, he left me alone with her ... on a hot August day, I would often sit, hidden from the world, thinking boy thoughts. I learned how to snare chub, and even pickerel, with a loop made of a long-stemmed grass; dragon-flies poised like humming-birds, and insects skated zigzag on the surface, casting odd shadows on the bottom.... Yes, Thoreau showed me things, and though it didn’t aid me in the Harvard curriculum,7 it helped me through life. Truly, Nature absorbed his attention, but I don’t think he cared much for what is called the beauties of nature; it was her way of working, her mystery, her economy in extravagance; he delighted to trace her footsteps toward their source.... He liked to feel that the pursuit was endless, with mystery at both ends of it....
WHAT I’M WRITING IS TRUE BUT NEVER MIND YOU CAN ALWAYS LIE TO YOURSELF
6. Actually we do not know of a single other occasion on which Julian came within eyesight of Thoreau. 7. Julian became a student of civil engineering, but the college asked him to leave and there would be no diploma. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1862
Here are Una Hawthorne, Julian Hawthorne, and Rose Hawthorne as of this year:
Despairing of selling his Egyptian statue “Cleopatra,” already famous due to the advance publicity given to it by Nathaniel Hawthorne in THE MARBLE FAUN, or his Libyan statue “Sibyl,” which was being said (presumably factitiously) by some to have been inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe’s recountings of Sojourner Truth, the sculptor William Wetmore Story allowed them to be transported by the government of Rome into the Roman Pavilion arranged by Pope Pius IX at the London universal exhibition. He would receive, much to his surprise, a letter offering £3,000 for them:
“This gave me confidence; I continued to work.”
To distinguish more finely between truth and story, during these Civil War years Sojourner Truth would be continuing her work in the solicitation of supplies for the black troop formations of the Union Army.
THE FUTURE IS MOST READILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Julian Hawthorne HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1864
May 24, Tuesday: People were continuing to kill each other at North Anna / Jericho Mill / Hanover Junction. In addition, on this day, people were killing each other at Wilson’s Wharf / Fort Pocahontas.
In Concord on this day, however, people were burying each other. Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal that:
Yesterday, May 23, we buried Hawthorne in Sleepy Hollow, in a pomp of HAWTHORNE sunshine and verdure, and gentle winds. James Freeman Clarke read the service in the church and at the grave. Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Agassiz, Hoar, Dwight, Whipple, Norton, Alcott, Hillard, Fields, Judge LONGFELLOW Thomas, and I attended the hearse as pallbearers. Franklin Pierce was J.R. LOWELL with the family. The church was copiously decorated with white flowers delicately arranged. The corpse was unwillingly shown, — only a few PROF. AGASSIZ moments to this company of his friends. But it was noble and serene in its aspect, — nothing amiss, — a calm and powerful head. A large company JUDGE E.R. HOAR filled the church and the grounds of the cemetery. All was so bright and J.S. DWIGHT quiet that pain or mourning was hardly suggested, and Holmes said to me C.K. WHIPPLE that it looked like a happy meeting. C.E. NORTON Clarke in the church said that Hawthorne had done more justice than any other to the shades of life, shown a sympathy with the crime in our BRONSON ALCOTT nature, and, like Jesus, was the friend of sinners. HILLARD I thought there was a tragic element in the event, that might be more FIELDS fully rendered, — in the painful solitude of the man, which, I suppose, JUDGE THOMAS could not longer be endured, and he died of it. I have found in his death a surprise and a disappointment. I thought him a greater man than any of his works betray, that there was still a great deal of work in him, and that he might one day show a purer power. Moreover, I have felt sure of him in his neighbourhood, and in his necessities of sympathy and intelligence, — that I could well wait his time, — his unwillingness and caprice, — and might one day conquer a friendship. It would have been a happiness, doubtless to both of us, to have come into habits of unreserved intercourse. It was easy to talk with him, — there were no barriers, — only, he said so little, that I talked too much, and stopped only because, as he gave no indications, I feared to exceed. He showed no egotism or self-assertion, rather a humility, and, at one time, a fear that he had written himself out. One day, when I found him on top of his hill, in the woods, he paced back the path to his house, and said, “This path is the only remembrance of me that will remain.” Now it appears that I waited too long. Lately he had removed himself the more by the indignation his perverse politics and unfortunate friendship for that paltry Franklin Pierce awakened, though it rather moved pity for Hawthorne, and the assured belief that he would outlive FRANKLIN PIERCE it, and come right at last. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“The Wayside” would be occupied by the widowed Mrs. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, with her two daughters Una Hawthorne and Rose Hawthorne and her son Julian Hawthorne, until, while again living in Europe, in October 1868 they would vend the place to George and Abby Gray. OLD HOUSES
HAWTHORNE MAY 23, 1864 How beautiful it was, that one bright day In the long week of rain! Though all its splendor could not chase away HDT WHAT? INDEX
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The omnipresent pain. The lovely town was white with apple-blooms, And the great elms o’erhead Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms Shot through with golden thread. Across the meadows, by the gray old manse, The historic river flowed: I was as one who wanders in a trance, Unconscious of his road. The faces of familiar friends seemed strange; Their voices I could hear, And yet the words they uttered seemed to change Their meaning to my ear. For the one face I looked for was not there, The one low voice was mute; Only an unseen presence filled the air, And baffled my pursuit. Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream Dimly my thought defines; I only see — a dream within a dream — The hill-top hearsed with pines. I only hear above his place of rest Their tender undertone, The infinite longings of a troubled breast, The voice so like his own. There in seclusion and remote from men The wizard hand lies cold, Which at its topmost speed let fall the pen, And left the tale half told. Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power, And the lost clew regain? The unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower Unfinished must remain!
DO I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION? GOOD.
Julian Hawthorne “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1866
October: Rather than grant Hinton Rowan Helper the 50% raise in salary for which he had been pleading, he was allowed to resign his responsibilities as US consul.
When it became mandatory for Julian Hawthorne to leave Harvard College, the Hawthornes relocated to Germany, so their son would be able to continue his education.
In collaboration with the composer Charles Edward Horsley, then living in Melbourne, Australia, Richard Henry Horne staged THE SOUTH SEA SISTERS, A LYRIC MASQUE. This was produced as one of the highlights to the opening of the Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition. The performance was well received by audiences and critics, and a few nights later was repeated.
CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT
Julian Hawthorne “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1870
November: Julian Hawthorne got married with May Amelung in New-York.
Representative George William Benson was again chosen to represent Wakarusa Township at the Kansas Legislature.
THE FUTURE CAN BE EASILY PREDICTED IN RETROSPECT
“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project Julian Hawthorne HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1876
George Parsons Lathrop’s A STUDY OF HAWTHORNE.
James Thomas Fields’s HAWTHORNE.
Under pressure of an attack by her brother Julian Hawthorne, who was accusing her of having shared “peculiarly private and delicate” family papers with “an outsider” (to wit her alcoholic biographer husband George Parsons Lathrop), Rose Hawthorne went, at least for the time being, “raving mad.”
Publication of DOLLIVER ROMANCE, in 3 parts. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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An article on Thomas Green Fessenden was included in FANSHAWE, AND OTHER PIECES (Boston).
THOMAS GREEN FESSENDEN was the eldest of nine children of the Rev. Thomas Fessenden. He was born on the 22d of April, 1771, at Walpole, in New Hampshire, where his father, a man of learning and talent, was long settled in the ministry. On the maternal side, likewise, he was of clerical extraction; his mother, whose piety and amiable qualities are remembered by her descendants, being the daughter of the Rev. Samuel Kendal, of New Salem. The early education of Thomas Green was chiefly at the common school of his native place, under the tuition of students from the college at Hanover; and such was his progress, that he became himself the instructor of a school in New Salem at the age of sixteen. He spent most of his youthful days, however, in bodily labor upon the farm, thus contributing to the support of a numerous family; and the practical knowledge of agriculture which he then obtained was long afterwards applied to the service of the public. Opportunities for cultivating his mind were afforded him, not only in his father’s library, but by the more miscellaneous contents of a large bookstore. He had passed the age of twenty-one when his inclination for mental pursuits determined him to become a student at Dartmouth College. His father being able to give but little assistance, his chief HDT WHAT? INDEX
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resources at college consisted in his wages as teacher of a village school during the vacations. At times, also, he gave instruction to an evening class in psalmody. From his childhood upward, Mr. Fessenden had shown symptoms of that humorous turn which afterwards so strongly marked his writings; but his first effort in verse, as he himself told me, was made during his residence at college. The themes, or exercises, of his fellow-students in English composition, whether prose or rhyme, were well characterized by the lack of native thought and feeling, the cold pedantry, the mimicry of classic models, common to all such productions. Mr. Fessenden had the good taste to disapprove of these vapid and spiritless performances, and resolved to strike out a new course for himself. On one occasion, when his classmates had gone through with their customary round of verbiage and threadbare sentiment, he electrified them and their instructor, President Wheelock, by reading “Jonathan’s Courtship.” There has never, to this day, been produced by any of our countrymen a more original and truly Yankee effusion. He had caught the rare art of sketching familiar manners, and of throwing into verse the very spirit of society as it existed around him; and he had imbued each line with a peculiar yet perfectly natural and homely humor. This excellent ballad compels me to regret, that, instead of becoming a satirist in politics and science, and wasting his strength on temporary and evanescent topics, he had not continued to be a rural poet. A volume of such sketches as “Jonathan’s Courtship,” describing various aspects of life among the yeomanry of New England, could not have failed to gain a permanent place in American literature. The effort in question met with unexampled success: it ran through the newspapers of the day, reappeared on the other side of the Atlantic, and was warmly applauded by the English critics, nor has it yet lost its popularity. New editions may be found every year at the ballad-stalls; and I saw last summer, on the veteran author’s table, a broadside copy of his maiden poem, which he had himself bought in the street. Mr. Fessenden passed through college with a fair reputation for scholarship, and took his degree in 1796. It had been his father’s wish that he should imitate the example of some of his ancestors on both sides, by devoting himself to the ministry. He, however, preferred the law, and commenced the study of that profession at Rutland, in Vermont, with Nathaniel Chipman, then the most eminent practitioner in the State. After his admission to the bar, Mr. Chipman received him into partnership. But Mr. Fessenden was ill qualified to succeed in the profession of law, by his simplicity of character, and his utter inability to acquire an ordinary share of shrewdness and worldly wisdom. Moreover, the success of “Jonathan’s Courtship,” and other poetical effusions, had turned his thoughts from law to literature, and had procured him the acquaintance of several literary luminaries of those days; none of whose names, probably, have survived to our own generation, save that of Joseph Dennie, once esteemed the finest writer in America. His HDT WHAT? INDEX
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intercourse with these people tempted Mr. Fessenden to spend much time in writing for newspapers and periodicals. A taste for scientific pursuits still further diverted him from his legal studies, and soon engaged him in an affair which influenced the complexion of all his after-life. A Mr. Langdon had brought forward a newly invented hydraulic machine, which was supposed to possess the power of raising water to a greater height than had hitherto been considered possible. A company of mechanics and others became interested in this machine, and appointed Mr. Fessenden their agent for the purpose of obtaining a patent in London. He was, likewise, a member of the company. Mr. Fessenden was urged to hasten his departure, in consequence of a report that certain persons had acquired the secret of the invention, and were determined to anticipate the proprietors in securing a patent. Scarcely time was allowed for testing the efficacy of the machine by a few hasty experiments, which, however, appeared satisfactory. Taking passage immediately, Mr. Fessenden arrived in London on the 4th of July, 1801, and waited on Mr. King, then our minister, by whom he was introduced to Mr. Nicholson, a gentleman of eminent scientific reputation. After thoroughly examining the invention, Mr. Nicholson gave an opinion unfavorable to its merits; and the question was soon settled by a letter from one of the Vermont proprietors to Mr. Fessenden, informing him that the apparent advantages of the machine had been found altogether deceptive. In short, Mr. Fessenden had been lured from his profession and country by as empty a bubble as that of the perpetual motion. Yet it is creditable both to his ability and energy, that, laying hold of what was really valuable in Langdon’s contrivance, he constructed the model of a machine for raising water from coal-mines, and other great depths, by means of what he termed the “renovated pressure of the atmosphere.” On communicating this invention to Mr. Nicholson and other eminent mechanicians, they acknowledged its originality and ingenuity, and thought that, in some situations, it might be useful. But the expenses of a patent in England, the difficulty of obtaining patronage for such a project, and the uncertainty of the result, were obstacles too weighty to be overcome. Mr. Fessenden threw aside the scheme, and, after a two months’ residence in London, was preparing to return home, when a new and characteristic adventure arrested him. He received a visit, at his lodging in the Strand, from a person whom he had never before seen, but who introduced himself to his good-will as being likewise an American. His business was of a nature well calculated to excite Mr. Fessenden’s interest. He produced the model of an ingenious contrivance for grinding corn. A patent had already been obtained; and a company, with the Lord Mayor of London at its head, was associated for the construction of mills upon this new principle. The inventor, according to his own story, had disposed of one fourth part of his patent for five hundred pounds, and was willing to accommodate his countryman with another fourth. After some HDT WHAT? INDEX
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inquiry into the stranger’s character and the accuracy of his statements, Mr. Fessenden became a purchaser of the share that was offered him; on what terms is not stated, but probably such as to involve his whole property in the adventure. The result was disastrous. The lord mayor soon withdrew his countenance from the project. It ultimately appeared that Mr. Fessenden was the only real purchaser of any part of the patent; and, as the original patentee shortly afterwards quitted the concern, the former was left to manage the business as he best could. With a perseverance not less characteristic than his credulity, he associated himself with four partners, and undertook to superintend the construction of one of these patent-mills upon the Thames. But his associates, who were men of no respectability, thwarted his plans; and after much toil of body, as well as distress of mind, he found himself utterly ruined, friendless and penniless, in the midst of London. No other event could have been anticipated, when a man so devoid of guile was thrown among a set of crafty adventurers. Being now in the situation in which many a literary man before him had been, he remembered the success of his fugitive poems, and betook himself to the pen as his most natural resource. A subject was offered him, in which no other poet would have found a theme for the Muse. It seemed to be his fatality to form connections with schemers of all sorts; and he had become acquainted with Benjamin Douglas Perkins, the patentee of the famous metallic tractors. These implements were then in great vogue for the cure of inflammatory diseases, by removing the superfluous electricity. Perkinism, as the doctrine of metallic tractors was styled, had some converts among scientific men, and many among the people, but was violently opposed by the regular corps of physicians and surgeons. Mr. Fessenden, as might be expected, was a believer in the efficacy of the tractors, and, at the request of Perkins, consented to make them the subject of a poem in Hudibrastic verse, the satire of which was to be levelled against their opponents. “Terrible Tractoration” was the result. It professes to be a poetical petition from Dr. Christopher Caustic, a medical gentleman who has been ruined by the metallic tractors and who applies to the Royal College of Physicians for relief and redress. The wits of the poor doctor have been somewhat shattered by his misfortunes; and, with crazy ingenuity, he contrives to heap ridicule on his medical brethren, under pretence of railing against Perkinism. The poem is in four cantos, the first of which is the best, and the most characteristic of the author. It is occupied with Dr. Caustic’s description of his mechanical and scientific contrivances, embracing all sorts of possible and impossible projects; every one of which, however, has a ridiculous plausibility. The inexhaustible variety in which they flow forth proves the author’s invention unrivalled in its way. It shows what had been the nature of Mr. Fessenden’s mental toil during his residence in London, continually brooding over the miracles of mechanism and science, his enthusiasm for which had cost him so dear. Long HDT WHAT? INDEX
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afterwards, speaking of the first conception of this poem, the author told me that he had shaped it out during a solitary day’s ramble in the outskirts of London; and the character of Dr. Caustic so strongly impressed itself on his mind, that, as he walked homeward through the crowded streets, he burst into frequent fits of laughter. The truth is, that, in the sketch of this wild projector, Mr. Fessenden had caricatured some of his own features; and, when he laughed so heartily, it was at the perception of the resemblance. “Terrible Tractoration” is a work of strange and grotesque ideas aptly expressed: its rhymes are of a most singular character, yet fitting each to each as accurately as echoes. As in all Mr. Fessenden’s productions, there is great exactness in the language; the author’s thoughts being thrown off as distinctly as impressions from a type. In regard to the pleasure to be derived from reading this poem, there is room for diversity of taste; but that it is an original and remarkable work, no person competent to pass judgment on a literary question will deny. It was first published early in the year 1803, in an octavo pamphlet of above fifty pages. Being highly applauded by the principal reviews, and eagerly purchased by the public, a new edition appeared at the end of two months, in a volume of nearly two hundred pages, illustrated with engravings. It received the praise of Gifford, the severest of English critics. Its continued success encouraged the author to publish a volume of “Original Poems,” consisting chiefly of his fugitive pieces from the American newspapers. This, also, was favorably received. He was now, what so few of his countrymen have ever been, a popular author in London; and, in the midst of his triumphs, he bethought himself of his native land. Mr. Fessenden returned to America in 1804. He came back poorer than he went, but with an honorable reputation, and with unstained integrity, although his evil fortune had connected him with men far unlike himself. His fame had preceded him across the Atlantic. Shortly before his arrival, an edition of “Terrible Tractoration” had been published at Philadelphia, with a prefatory memoir of the author, the tone of which proves that the American people felt themselves honored in the literary success of their countryman. Another edition appeared in New York, in 1806, considerably enlarged, with a new satire on the topics of the day. It is symptomatic of the course which the author had now adopted, that much of this new satire was directed against Democratic principles and the prominent upholders of them. This was soon followed by “Democracy Unveiled,” a more elaborate attack on the same political party. In “Democracy Unveiled,” our friend Dr. Caustic appears as a citizen of the United States, and pours out six cantos of vituperative verse, with copious notes of the same tenor, on the heads of President Jefferson and his supporters. Much of the satire is unpardonably coarse. The literary merits of the work are inferior to those of “Terrible Tractoration;” but it is no less original and peculiar. Even where the matter is a mere HDT WHAT? INDEX
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versification of newspaper slander, Dr. Caustic’s manner gives it an individuality not to be mistaken. The book passed through three editions in the course of a few months. Its most pungent portions were copied into all the opposition prints; its strange, jog-trot stanzas were familiar to every ear; and Mr. Fessenden may fairly be allowed the credit of having given expression to the feelings of the great Federal party. On the 30th of August, 1806, Mr. Fessenden commenced the publication, at New York, of “The Weekly Inspector,” a paper at first of eight, and afterwards of sixteen, octavo pages. It appeared every Saturday. The character of this journal was mainly political; but there are also a few flowers and sweet- scented twigs of literature intermixed among the nettles and burrs, which alone flourish in the arena of party strife. Its columns are profusely enriched with scraps of satirical verse, in which Dr. Caustic, in his capacity of ballad-maker to the Federal faction, spared not to celebrate every man or measure of government that was anywise susceptible of ridicule. Many of his prose articles are carefully and ably written, attacking not men so much as principles and measures; and his deeply felt anxiety for the welfare of his country sometimes gives an impressive dignity to his thoughts and style. The dread of French domination seems to have haunted him like a nightmare. But, in spite of the editor’s satirical reputation, “The Weekly Inspector” was too conscientious a paper, too sparingly spiced with the red pepper of personal abuse, to succeed in those outrageous times. The publication continued but for a single year, at the end of which we find Mr. Fessenden’s valedictory to his readers. Its tone is despondent both as to the prospects of the country and his own private fortunes. The next token of his labors that has come under my notice is a small volume of verse, published at Philadelphia in 1809, and alliteratively entitled “Pills, Poetical, Political, and Philosophical; prescribed for the Purpose of purging the Public of Piddling Philosophers, Penny Poetasters, of Paltry Politicians, and Petty Partisans. By Peter Pepper-Box, Poet and Physician.” This satire had been written during the embargo, but, not making its appearance till after the repeal of that measure, met with less success than “Democracy Unveiled.” Everybody who has known Mr. Fessenden must have wondered how the kindest hearted man in all the world could have likewise been the most noted satirist of his day. For my part, I have tried in vain to form a conception of my venerable and peaceful friend as a champion in the stormy strife of party, flinging mud full in the faces of his foes, and shouting forth the bitter laughter that rang from border to border of the land; and I can hardly believe, though well assured of it, that his antagonists should ever have meditated personal violence against the gentlest of human creatures. I am sure, at least, that Nature never meant him for a satirist. On careful examination of his works, I do not find in any of them the ferocity of the true blood-hound of literature, such as Swift, or Churchill, or Cobbett, — which HDT WHAT? INDEX
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fastens upon the throat of its victim, and would fain drink his life-blood. In my opinion, Mr. Fessenden never felt the slightest personal ill-will against the objects of his satire, except, indeed, they had endeavored to detract from his literary reputation, — an offence which he resented with a poet’s sensibility, and seldom failed to punish. With such exceptions, his works are not properly satirical, but the offspring of a mind inexhaustibly fertile in ludicrous ideas, which it appended to any topic in hand. At times, doubtless, the all-pervading frenzy of the times inspired him with a bitterness not his own. But, in the least defensible of his writings, he was influenced by an honest zeal for the public good. There was nothing mercenary in his connection with politics. To an antagonist, who had taunted him with being poor, he calmly replied, that he “need not have been accused of the crime of poverty, could he have prostituted his principles to party purposes, and become the hireling assassin of the dominant faction.” Nor can there be a doubt that the administration would gladly have purchased the pen of so popular a writer. I have gained hardly any information of Mr. Fessenden’s life between the years 1807 and 1812; at which latter period, and probably some time previous, he was settled at the village of Bellows Falls, on Connecticut River, in the practice of the law. In May of that year, he had the good fortune to become acquainted with Miss Lydia Tuttle, daughter of Mr. John Tuttle, an independent and intelligent farmer at Littleton, Mass. She was then on a visit in Vermont. After her return home, a correspondence ensued between this lady and Mr. Fessenden, and was continued till their marriage, in September, 1813. She was considerably younger than himself, but endowed with the qualities most desirable in the wife of such a man; and it would not be easy to overestimate how much his prosperity and happiness were increased by this union. Mrs. Fessenden could appreciate what was excellent in her husband, and supply what was deficient. In her affectionate good sense he found a substitute for the worldly sagacity which he did not possess, and could not learn. To her he intrusted the pecuniary cares, always so burdensome to a literary man. Her influence restrained him from such imprudent enterprises as had caused the misfortunes of his earlier years. She smoothed his path of life, and made it pleasant to him, and lengthened it; for, as he once told me (I believe it was while advising me to take, betimes, a similar treasure to myself), he would have been in his grave long ago, but for her care. Mr. Fessenden continued to practise law at Bellows Falls till 1815, when he removed to Brattleborough, and assumed the editorship of “The Brattleborough Reporter,” a political newspaper. The following year, in compliance with a pressing invitation from the inhabitants, he returned to Bellows Falls, and edited, with much success, a literary and political paper, called “The Intelligencer.” He held this employment till the year 1822, at the same time practising law, and composing a HDT WHAT? INDEX
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volume of poetry, “The Ladies’ Monitor,” besides compiling several works in law, the arts, and agriculture. During this part of his life, he usually spent sixteen hours of the twenty- four in study. In 1822 he came to Boston as editor of “The New England Farmer,” a weekly journal, the first established, and devoted principally to the diffusion of agricultural knowledge. His management of the “Farmer” met unreserved approbation. Having been bred upon a farm, and passed much of his later life in the country, and being thoroughly conversant with the writers on rural economy, he was admirably qualified to conduct such a journal. It was extensively circulated throughout New England, and may be said to have fertilized the soil like rain from heaven. Numerous papers on the same plan sprung up in various parts of the country but none attained the standard of their prototype. Besides his editorial labors, Mr. Fessenden published, from time to time, various compilations on agricultural subjects, or adaptations of English treatises to the use of the American husbandman. Verse he no longer wrote, except, now and then, an ode or song for some agricultural festivity. His poems, being connected with topics of temporary interest, ceased to be read, now that the metallic tractors were thrown aside, and that the blending and merging of parties had created an entire change of political aspects, since the days of “Democracy Unveiled.” The poetic laurel withered among his gray hairs, and dropped away, leaf by leaf. His name, once the most familiar, was forgotten in the list of American bards. I know not that this oblivion was to be regretted. Mr. Fessenden, if my observation of his temperament be correct, was peculiarly sensitive and nervous in regard to the trials of authorship — a little censure did him more harm than much praise could do him good; and methinks the repose of total neglect was better for him than a feverish notoriety. Were it worth while to imagine any other course for the latter part of his life, which he made so useful and so honorable, it might be wished that he could have devoted himself entirely to scientific research. He had a strong taste for studies of that kind, and sometimes used to lament that his daily drudgery afforded him no leisure to compose a work on calorie, which subject he had thoroughly investigated. In January, 1836, I became, and continued for a few months, an inmate of Mr. Fessenden’s family. It was my first acquaintance with him. His image is before my mind’s eye at this moment; slowly approaching me with a lamp in his hand, his hair gray, his face solemn and pale, his tall and portly figure bent with heavier infirmity than befitted his years. His dress, though he had improved in this particular since middle life, was marked by a truly scholastic negligence. He greeted me kindly, and with plain, old-fashioned courtesy; though I fancied that he somewhat regretted the interruption of his evening studies. After a few moments’ talk, he invited me to accompany him to his study, and give my opinion on some passages of satirical verse, which were to be inserted in a new edition of “Terrible Tractoration.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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Years before, I had lighted on an illustrated copy of this poem, bestrewn with venerable dust, in a corner of a college library and it seemed strange and whimsical that I should find it still in progress of composition, and be consulted about it by Dr. Caustic himself. While Mr. Fessenden read, I had leisure to glance around at his study, which was very characteristic of the man and his occupations. The table, and great part of the floor, were covered with books and pamphlets on agricultural subjects, newspapers from all quarters, manuscript articles for “The New England Farmer,” and manuscript stanzas for “Terrible Tractoration.” There was such a litter as always gathers around a literary man. It bespoke, at once, Mr. Fessenden’s amiable temper and his abstracted habits, that several members of the family, old and young, were sitting in the room, and engaged in conversation, apparently without giving him the least disturbance. A specimen of Dr. Caustic’s inventive genius was seen in the “Patent Steam and Hot-Water Stove,” which heated the apartment, and kept up a pleasant singing sound, like that of a tea-kettle, thereby making the fireside more cheerful. It appears to me, that, having no children of flesh and blood, Mr. Fessenden had contracted a fatherly fondness for this stove, as being his mental progeny; and it must be owned that the stove well deserved his affection, and repaid it with much warmth. The new edition of “Tractoration” came out not long afterwards. It was noticed with great kindness by the press, but was not warmly received by the public. Mr. Fessenden imputed the failure, in part, to the illiberality of the “trade,” and avenged himself by a little poem, in his best style, entitled “Wooden Book-sellers”; so that the last blow of hiS satirical scourge was given in the good old cause of authors against publishers. Notwithstanding a wide difference of age, and many more points of dissimilarity than of resemblance, Mr. Fessenden and myself soon became friends. His partiality seemed not to be the result of any nice discrimination of my good and evil qualities (for he had no acuteness in that way), but to be given instinctively, like the affection of a child. On my part, I loved the old man because his heart was as transparent as a fountain; and I could see nothing in it but integrity and purity, and simple faith in his fellow-men, and good-will towards all the world. His character was so open, that I did not need to correct my original conception of it. He never seemed to me like a new acquaintance, but as one with whom I had been familiar from my infancy. Yet he was a rare man, such as few meet with in the course of a lifetime. It is remarkable, that, with such kindly affections, Mr. Fessenden was so deeply absorbed in thought and study as scarcely to allow himself time for domestic and social enjoyment. During the winter when I first knew him, his mental drudgery was almost continual. Besides “The New England Farmer,” he had the editorial charge of two other journals, “The Horticultural Register,” and “The Silk Manual”; in addition to HDT WHAT? INDEX
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which employment, he was a member of the State Legislature, and took some share in the debates. The new matter of “Terrible Tractoration” likewise cost him intense thought. Sometimes I used to meet him in the street, making his way onward apparently by a sort of instinct; while his eyes took note of nothing, and would, perhaps, pass over my face without sign of recognition. He confessed to me that he was apt to go astray when intent on rhyme. With so much to abstract him from outward life, he could hardly be said to live in the world that was bustling around him. Almost the only relaxation that he allowed himself was an occasional performance on a bass-viol, which stood in the corner of his study, and from which he loved to elicit some old- fashioned tune of soothing potency. At meal-times, however, dragged down and harassed as his spirits were, he brightened up, and generally gladdened the whole table with a flash of Dr. Caustic’s humor. Had I anticipated being Mr. Fessenden’s biographer, I might have drawn from him many details that would have been well worth remembering. But he had not the tendency of most men in advanced life, to be copious in personal reminiscences; nor did he often speak of the noted writers and politicians with whom the chances of earlier years had associated him. Indeed, lacking a turn for observation of character, his former companions had passed before him like images in a mirror, giving him little knowledge of their inner nature. Moreover, till his latest day, he was more inclined to form prospects for the future than to dwell upon the past. I remember –the last time, save one, that we ever met– I found him on the bed, suffering with a dizziness of the brain. He roused himself, however, and grew very cheerful; talking, with a youthful glow of fancy, about emigrating to Illinois, where he possessed a farm, and picturing a new life for both of us in that Western region. It has since come to my memory, that, while he spoke, there was a purple flush across his brow, — the harbinger of death. I saw him but once more alive. On the thirteenth day of November last, while on my way to Boston, expecting shortly to take him by the hand, a letter met me with an invitation to his funeral. He had been struck with apoplexy on Friday evening, three days before, and had lain insensible till Saturday night, when he expired. The burial took place at Mount Auburn on the ensuing Tuesday. It was a gloomy day; for the first snow-storm of the season had been drifting through the air since morning; and the “Garden of Graves” looked the dreariest spot on earth. The snow came down so fast, that it covered the coffin in its passage from the hearse to the sepulchre. The few male friends who had followed to the cemetery descended into the tomb; and it was there that I took in my last glance at the features of a man who will hold a place in my remembrance apart from other men. He was like no other. In his long pathway through life, from his cradle to the place where we had now laid him, he had come, a man indeed in intellect and achievement, but, in guileless simplicity, a child. Dark would have been the hour, if, when we closed the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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door of the tomb upon his perishing mortality, we had believed that our friend was there. It is contemplated to erect a monument, by subscription, to Mr. Fessenden’s memory. It is right that he should be thus honored. Mount Auburn will long remain a desert, barren of consecrated marbles, if worth like his be yielded to oblivion. Let his grave be marked out, that the yeomen of New England may know where he sleeps; for he was their familiar friend, and has visited them at all their firesides. He has toiled for them at seed-time and harvest: he has scattered the good grain in every field; and they have garnered the increase. Mark out his grave as that of one worthy to be remembered both in the literary and political annals of our country, and let the laurel be carved on his memorial stone; for it will cover the ashes of a man of genius. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1881
In Concord, after the death of Francis Hawthorne Lathrop, “The Wayside” would be occupied for a couple of years by Mrs. Julian Hawthorne and her six children. (When Julian would return from abroad in Spring 1882, he would rejoin his family there.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1882
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s DOCTOR GRIMSHAWE’S SECRET, with Preface and Notes by his son Julian.
E.M. O’Connor’s ANALYTICAL INDEX OF HAWTHORNE’S WORKS. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1883
May 1, Tuesday: In Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin issued its Riverside Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s WORKS in twelve volumes, with introductory notes by George Parsons Lathrop.8
Organic Law was promulgated in Egypt, creating a Provincial Council, Legislative Council, General Assembly, and Council of State over which, of course, Britain retained final control.
8. George Parsons Lathrop had been born in Honolulu on August 25, 1851, had been educated in Dresden, New York and had studied for the law there, and had married Rose Hawthorne in 1871. He would be the assistant editor of The Atlantic Monthly from 1875 to 1877. He owned “The Wayside” in Concord and fought with Julian Hawthorne. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1884
Julian Hawthorne’s NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND HIS WIFE. This is the book in which Julian alleged that as of December 1852 “Thoreau’s hut was still standing on a level, pine-circled spot, near the margin” (actually, Thoreau’s shanty had been for some period of years on the opposite side of town from Walden Pond — and this provides you a clue as to how seriously you ought to receive anything this lad has to offer).
An etching purporting to represent Sophia Peabody Hawthorne at the age of 36 was prepared by S.A. Schoff, evidently on the basis of a Daguerreotype, to be presented opposite page 242 in Volume 1 of the above. The text description to accompany this illustration was given as “Sophia contemplates the viewer with her large, placid eyes. She is quite plain even in this portrait. Her nose and philtrum are a little too large and she looks as if she might need glasses. Her hair and dress are not at all fashionable; she wears no jewellery (is that a locket or a high collar?). Even though she is a dentist’s daughter, we cannot see her teeth. She will be the perfect wife for Nathaniel.”
James D. Hurd became a partner in Houghton, Mifflin, and Co.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI, in Houghton, Mifflin’s American Men of Letters series, made Margaret into an honorary guy.
When presidential candidate Grover Cleveland was attacked for immorality, the Reverend Higginson sprang HDT WHAT? INDEX
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to his defense.
May: Professor Asa Gray traveled to St. Louis.
Harvey D. Parker died in his home at 141 Boylston Street, at the age of 79. the facade of the Parker House would be “heavily draped” in mourning. From his fortune, $100,000 would go to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which now features a Harvey D. Parker Collection. The funeral service would be at the Arlington Street Church that the deceased had attended, and the body would be deposited in the Mount Auburn Cemetery.
The following appeared in Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, Volume 28, Numder 1, on pages 3-17 : The Salem of Hawthorn By Julian Hawthorne NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE’S instinct for localities was not strongly developed; wherever he walked, in city or country (and he was very fond of walking), he constantly missed his way; This trait, or deficiency, is not without its reflection in his writings. It is of small importance to him what the topography of his story may be, — whether his house faces north or south, whether his street turns to the right or to the left. He is willing to let these and analogous matters take care of themselves; and herein he differs markedly from the great French novelist Balzac, who wrote by the map and the rule, and who always knew precisely the income of all his people, and from what investments it was derived. On the other hand, the American possessed, to quite as great a degree as the Frenchman, the perception of the picturesque; his light and shadow, his color and atmosphere, have never been surpassed. But he shunned rather than sought to make his outlines and directions correspond too closely with palpable reality. The intensity with which he could convey the feeling of a place, a character, or a situation, was almost in inverse ratio to its literal resemblance to any material prototype; he was essentially a romancer, and the world of his imagination was like the material world only as the mind of man is like his body: a spiritual world of types, elements, and harmonies, rather than a physical world of accidents, individuals, and technicalities. When I was lately visiting the scenes of his stories, I was impressed by nothing more than by the manner in which he had contrived to escape from the rigid flesh and blood of his scenes, and to make everything plastic and significant, while fully preserving and indeed intensifying the spirit and sentiment which the scenes embodied. The subtle, artistic balance and structure of his compositions would have been distorted by the intrusion of photographic facts. His characters and his scenery bore an organic relation to the theme or plot in which they appeared and acted. It has been surmised that what is technically termed construction was Hawthorne’s weak point; and, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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in the Wilkie Collins sense of construction, this is true. But the author of “The Scarlet Letter” took a view of artistic proportion — the answering of part to part, the culmination and the catastrophe — indefinitely deeper than Mr. Collins’s, because moral and spiritual. His episodes are of the mind and heart, not of the body; and on this plane the construction of his romances is as nearly perfect as, on another plane, is that of “Tom Jones” or “The Moonstone.” What has been said suggests the conclusion that there is comparatively little to be gained by the most conscientious consideration of the localities in which for lack of better, the characters of Hawthorne’s stories are seen and developed. The true localities of the stories are in the characters themselves. who, secondarily, are reflected in their surroundings. In the case of Dickens it was quite otherwise; and that curious sort of entertainment which is found by many people — in the autographs, the birthplaces, the old hats and snuff-boxes, the inns and the graves of great or notorious personages, may receive a similar gratification in hunting out the houses and the streets of Dickens’s fictitious society, and noticing how closely the fiction coincides with the reality. This pleasure has, I believe, already been tasted by the readers of this magazine; but they must not anticipate anything quite comparable to it in the present instance. What I have to report may augment their appreciation of Hawthorne’s power of making bricks without straw, and even without clay upon occasion, but will do little to enhance his reputation as a Chinese copyist. Some people will not regard this as a defect; but there is some ground for believing that Hawthorne himself aimed rather to increase than to diminish the external verisimilitude of his pictures. It would otherwise be difficult to account for the existence of his journals and note-books, from which imagination is, as much as possible, excluded, and a constant effort is made to give an accurate and dispassionate record and representation of things as they are. The impression produced by the note-books is oddly different from that of the romances — a difference comparable in kind and degree to that between the voice in ordinary speech and in singing. The descriptions in the books are conscientious and laborious, and strike one, perhaps, as having been written coldly and somewhat against the grain — written not for their own sake, but as auxiliary to an ulterior purpose. It is often edifying to observe how a passage from these records has been transmuted from commonplace metal into fine gold on being incorporated with the living organism of the romance. The specific accuracy has become less, but the fidelity to essential truth has become greater. On the whole, however, the illusion of reality is doubtless greater in Hawthorne’s later works than in the “Twice-told Tales” and the “Mosses from an Old Manse.” The substance of the later works is wrought out of a wider experience and observation of actualities than is the case with the earlier ones. Yet the imagination has gained power proportionate to the increased observation and experience, and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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is as far as ever from being dominated by them. The work is richer and more minute, but it is just as truly creative as before; the fusion of the elements is no less complete. “The Marble Faun” is as thoroughly Hawthorne, to the outermost particle, as is “The Gray Champion” or “Feathertop.” So that, after all, the result of the note-books was different from their apparent aim (as I have supposed it), and much better worth the pains bestowed on producing them. I doubt if my father ever realized how searchingly powerful his imagination was. He did not perceive the ardor of his own fire; the magic of his own atmosphere was hidden from him. He fancied he was telling his story in quite a plain and obvious way, and was rather amused at the depths and splendors which other people thought they saw in it. Of course I do not mean to imply that he did not know what he was about. The “Grimshawe” studies, lately published in this magazine, show that no one comprehended the methods and art of fiction better than he. He was never careless, and he had the unmitigable conscience of a Puritan. He was not of that order of genius that yields itself up to vague, hysteric deliriums of inspiration, and in that condition evolves something which as often turns out silly as sublime. When he was warmed to his work, he was more himself — more in command of every faculty he possessed — than at any other time. He never wrote a sentence that he did not himself thoroughly understand. He could criticism his own processes, aims, and results as justly as the most dispassionate reviewer. But there was one quality, one faculty in himself that he could never estimate or criticism — the most important quality or faculty of all. It was the quality that no one else ever possessed, the faculty that no one else ever exercised, the thing, whatever it was, that makes him Hawthorne. Some years ago one of our magazines published a story, a translation from the German, entitled “The Face in the Rock” (or something of that kind). It was a literary curiosity, for it was neither more nor less than Hawthorne’s “Great Stone Face,” which had been translated into German and afterward turned back into English by some one who had never heard of the original. Here was the story, sentence for sentence the same, and yet as different from it as is a cabbage from a rose. I have often wondered what my father would have thought of it; whether he would have perceived as distinctly as another person the immeasurable superiority imparted by touches too fine and subtle to be described — the touches which no one else could give, and which even he gave, as it were, unconsciously, because it was the natural expression of his temperament and organization. I may return to this matter another time, for it is full of suggestion; but for the present it is enough to observe that the faculty of self-appreciation (not altogether strange to our later writers) is not precisely the most valuable element of the literary organization, inasmuch as it stands in the way of that genial unconsciousness, of that freedom from the sense of being overlooked and criticized, which is indispensable to the production of original and harmonious work. Though Hawthorne was HDT WHAT? INDEX
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humility itself in his estimate of his own powers, yet when once he was under the influence of his muse, not all the criticism of ancient and modern times could have made him swerve by so much as a hair’s breadth from the path along which she led him. When he was at work he was in a region by himself, — alone with his art, — into which the voices of the exterior world could never penetrate, nor its presence intrude. The work being done, however, and sent forth, the worker would return to a colder and more skeptical state, in which he took, as it were, the part of the world against himself, and led the attack. So little is known of the man that it has always been the custom to paint his portrait from the same palette which he himself used for his pictures. But it is important to remember that the man and the writer were, in Hawthorne’s case, as different as a mountain from a cloud. It was not until after his death that I read any of his romances; he had always told me that they were not suited to my age and requirements; and I remember, as I read on, being constantly unable to comprehend how a man such as I knew my father to be could have written such books. He did not talk in that way; his moods had not seemed to be of that color. The books gave me an enlarged though not a more powerful impression of him. He was a very strong man, in every application of the word. I have seen him in company with many of the great men of his time, and I was always made to feel that his was the loftier and dominant spirit — that he was to other men what Augustus Caesar is said to have been to Marc Antony. It is true that I was but a child; but I apprehend that the perceptions of a child in such matters, being mainly intuitive, are at least as apt to be just as those of mature persons. At all events, subsequent meditation and experience have served rather to augment than to lessen my estimate of his personal power and weight. As regards the books, it is difficult to state exactly the relation they bore to the general manifestation of his character; perhaps it might be said that they resulted from the immediate action of his spirit, in a spiritual plane; whereas in other matters it acted through his material part, in the physical plane. But there is more vanity than profit in such distinctions, and the topic is, moreover, not essential to the present inquiry, indefinite and vagabond though that be. HAWTHORNE was born in Salem; it was mostly the scene of such of his earlier tales as pretend to any definite location at all; the “House of the Seven Gables” was erected there; and finally, at the close of his literary career, he returned to Salem to find the scene of “Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret.” Salem, consequently, might reasonably be presumed to be a singularly picturesque and interesting old town. In the matter of age, no doubt, it can court comparison with any settlement in New England; the place bore the name of Salem as long ago as 1629, after having been called Bastable in 1614, and Naum-Keag by the aboriginal Indians. Concerning this latter appellation, Cotton Mather, with that fondness for the miraculous which characterized his epoch, writes as follows in his “Magnalia” “Of HDT WHAT? INDEX
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which place I have somewhere met with an odd observation, that the name of it is rather Hebrew than Indian for Nahum signifies comfort, and Keik signifies an haven; and our English not only found it an haven of comfort, but happened also to put an Hebrew name upon it; for they called it Salem, for the peace which they had hoped in it.” That “odd observation” was probably met with in a publication called “The Planter’s Plea,” printed in London in 1630, in which it is written: “It fals out, that the name of the place, which one late colony hath chosen for their seat, prooves to bee perfect Hebrew, being called Nahum Keike; by interpretation, the bosom of consolation; which it were pitty that those which observed it not, should change into the name of Salem, though upon a fair ground, in remembrance of a peace setled upon a conference at a generall meeting betweene them and their neighbors, after expectance of some dangerous jarre.” This fanciful etymology, though never formally recognized or adopted by the body corporate of the citizens, is informally and sentimentally used by them to this day. I remember that my maternal grandmother, at the time she was living in Boston, used affectionately to speak of her native Salem by the title of “Old Naum-Keag.” Hawthorne himself, in his “Main Street,” an article printed in the “Snow-Image” volume, has given the best antiquarian picture of the growth of his native town that is likely to be met with anywhere. He begins at the period when the site of the Main street (now called Essex street) was a tract of forest land, over which the dusty pavement of the thoroughfare was hereafter to extend. This tract, about a mile and a half in length by half a mile in breadth, and bounded on three sides by water, is hardly definable nowadays. Two hundred and seventy years ago, however, along through the vista of impending boughs, might have been seen a faintly-traced path, running nearly east and west, “as if a prophecy or foreboding of the future street had stolen into the heart of the solemn old wood.” The great Squaw Sachem and the red Chief Wappacowet pass on beneath the tangled shade, imagining, doubtless, that their own system of affairs will endure forever; the squirrel rustles in the trees, the deer leaps in his covert; we catch the cruel and stealthy eye of a wolf, as he draws back into yonder imperious density of underbrush; a momentary streak of sunlight finds its way down through the gloom of the broad wilderness and glimmers among the feathers of the Indian’s dusky hair. Can it be that the thronged street of a city will ever pass into this twilight solitude? Casting our eyes again over the scene, we behold a stalwart figure, clad in a leathern jerkin and breeches of the same, striding sturdily onward with his gun over his shoulder, bringing home the choice portions of a deer. This is Roger Conant, the first settler of Naum-Keag, “a man of thoughtful strength.” There stands his habitation, “showing in its rough HDT WHAT? INDEX
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architecture some features of the Indian wigwam, and some of the log-cabin, and somewhat, too, of the straw-thatched cottage in Old England, where this good yeoman had his birth and breeding.” A few years more, and “the forest track trodden more and more by the hob-nailed shoes of these sturdy and ponderous Englishmen, has now a distinctness which it never would have acquired from the light tread of hundred times as many Indian moccasins. It will be a street anon. It goes onward from one clearing to another, here plunging into a shadowy strip of woods, there open to the sunshine, but everywhere showing a decided line, along which human interests have begun to note their career. Over yonder swampy spot two trees have been felled, and laid side by side to make a causeway.” This “swampy spot,” by the bye, was at or about the junction of the present Essex and Washington streets, and the track of the Eastern Railway runs through it. In the course of time, John Endicott, the first governor of the new settlement, enters upon the scene. “Two venerable trees unite their branches high above his head, thus forming a triumphal arch of living verdure, beneath which he pauses, with his wife leaning on his arm, to catch the first impression of their new-found home.” In a copy of Felt’s “Annals of Salem” which belonged to my father, I have seen a lithographed portrait of this famous Puritan, with a facsimile of his signature — ”Jo: Endecott” underneath. He wears a black skull-cap; his head and face are round and full; the hair that curls down on either side his visage is white, and so are his mustache and pointed beard. His expression is grave and resolute, but serene and kindly; scarcely the man, in appearance, to cut the Red Cross out of the banner of England, as is described in the sketch called “Endicott and the Red Cross.” He is there described as “a man of stern and resolute countenance, the effect of which was heightened by a grizzled beard that swept the upper portion of his breast-plate.” When in anger, “a wrathful change came over his manly countenance. The blood glowed through it till it seemed to be kindled with an internal heat; nor was it unnatural to suppose that his breast-plate would likewise become red with the angry fire of the bosom which it covered.” He brandished his sword, “thrust it through the cloth, and, with his left hand, rent the Red Cross completely out of the banner. He then waved the tattered ensign above his head.... With a cry of triumph, the people gave their sanction to one of the boldest exploits which our history records. And forever honored be the name of Endicott! We look back through the mist of ages, and recognize, in the rending of the Red Cross from New England’s banner, the first omen of that deliverance which our fathers consummated, after the bones of the stern Puritan had lain more than a century in the dust.” This sketch, which is scarcely more than half a dozen pages in length, is one of Hawthorne’s earlier pieces; but it is full of fire and eloquence. Let us, however, return to the main street. Six or seven years after Roger Conant’s appearance, “the street HDT WHAT? INDEX
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had lost the aromatic odor of the pine-trees, and of the sweet- fern that grew beneath them. Gardens are fenced in, and display pumpkin-beds and rows of cabbages and beans. No wolf, for a year past, has been heard to bark, or known to range among the dwellings, except that single one, whose grizzly head, with a plash of blood beneath it, is now affixed to the portal of the meeting-house.” “Still later, the forest track has been converted into a dusty thoroughfare, which, being intersected with lanes and cross-paths, may fairly be designated as Main street. Houses of quaint architecture have now risen; most of, them have one huge chimney in the center, with flues so vast that it must have been easy for the witches to fly out of them. Around this great chimney the wooden house clusters itself, in a whole community of gable-ends, each ascending into its own separate peak; the second story, with its lattice windows, projecting over the first; and the door, which is perhaps arched, provided on the outside with an iron hammer, wherewith the visitor’s hand may give a thundering rat-a-tat.... On the upper corner of that green lane, which shall hereafter be called North street, we see the Curwen House, newly built, with the carpenters still at work on the roof, nailing down the last sheaf of shingles. On the lower corner stands another dwelling, — destined, at some period of its existence, to be the abode of an unsuccessful alchemist, — which shall likewise survive to our generation.” There is a picture of the old Curwen House in Felt’s “Annals,” and it seems to have at least seven gables. It has gone through many transformations since its first erection in 1642, but the edifice, which is still to be seen on the corner of North and Essex streets, a few rods west of the railway station, is said to be substantially the same building. At the time of the persecution of the witches, several examinations of those unhappy persons were held in one of its apartments. The inquiry has often been made: which of the old Salem houses was the prototype of the “House of the Seven Gables”? and the Curwen House, among several others, has been pointed out as the one. Intelligent inquirers of this kind will probably be disappointed to learn that the old Pynchon House had no prototype at all. It is itself a type of the kind of houses that were built in the latter half of the seventeenth century. “These edifices,” says Hawthorne himself, “were built in one generally accordant style, though with such subordinate variety as keeps the beholder’s curiosity excited, and causes each structure, like its owner’s character, to produce its own peculiar impression.” In the preface to the romance he “trusts not to be considered as unpardonably offending, by laying out a street that infringes upon nobody’s private rights, and appropriating a lot of land which had no visible owner, and building a house of materials long used for constructing castles in the air.” No one with any understanding of the nature of Hawthorne’s genius could believe it even possible for him to import into his HDT WHAT? INDEX
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stories true literal portraits, either of houses or persons; but he frequently alluded, with a certain arch lifting of the right eyebrow that was characteristic of him when amused, to the perverse determination of his friends and correspondents to believe that Zenobia, for example, was suggested by Margaret Fuller; that he himself was Miles Coverdale; that the Pynchon House existed in wood and plaster; or that Judge Pynchon was an enemy whom he had pilloried under that fictitious name. There is not a syllable of truth in any one of these surmises; but this is something which people devoid (as most of us are) of imagination can never be persuaded to credit or comprehend. We have now arrived, in our review of the history of Main street, at the epoch of the persecutions of the Quakers, and here Hawthorne takes occasion to insert a passage of his own ancestral annals. “There a woman — it is Ann Coleman, — naked from the waist upward, and bound to the tail of a cart, is dragged through the main street at the pace of a brisk walk, while the constable follows with a whip of knotted cords. He loves his business, faithful officer that he is, and puts his soul into every stroke, zealous to fulfill the injunction of Major Hawthorne’s warrant, in the spirit and to the letter. There came down a stroke that has drawn blood! and with thirty such stripes of blood upon her is she to be driven into the forest. The crimson trail goes wavering along the main street; but Heaven grant that, as the rain of so many years has wept upon it time after time, and washed it all away, so there may have been a dew of mercy to cleanse this cruel blood-stain out of the record of the persecutor’s life!” This Major Hawthorne, or Hathorne, as the name was then spelt, was the first American emigrant of our family. It is very characteristic of his descendant to have made this prayer of vicarious penitence for his forefathers’ sin. Their blood and temperament were strong in him; he felt the burden of their misdeeds almost as his own; and I have often heard him speak, half fancifully and half in earnest, of the curse invoked by one of the witches upon Colonel John Hawthorne and all his posterity, and of the strange manner in which it had taken effect. Following the Quakers come the witches. The witches always had a special interest or fascination for my father, as might be inferred from the character and tone of the allusions to them in his published writings. But it is perhaps not generally known that he wrote a number of tales having witches for their subject-matter, that were said by the one or two persons who saw them to be more powerful, as conceptions of weird and fantastic horror, than anything in the printed volumes of short stories. But these tales never emerged from the manuscript state, and were finally burned by their author, because, as my mother told me he had explained to her, he felt that they were not true. That is, I suppose, they embodied no moral truth; they were mere imaginative narratives, founded on history and tradition, and had not the spiritual balance and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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proportion of what Hawthorne would deem a work of art. But I cannot help regretting that the manuscripts were not accidentally preserved. His touch acquires a deeper vividness wherever witches come in his way “While we supposed the old man to be reading the Bible to his old wife, — she meanwhile knitting in the chimney-corner. — the pair of hoary reprobates have whisked up the chimney, both on one broomstick and flown away to a witch-communion, far into the depths of the chill, dark forest. How foolish! were it only for fear of rheumatic pains in their old bones, they had better have stayed at home. But away they went; and the laughter of their decayed, cackling voices has been heard at midnight, aloft in the air. Now, in the sunny noontide, as they go tottering to the gallows, it is the devil’s turn to laugh.” Next to the witches, the stern, gloomy, self-confident, and sometimes bloodthirsty Puritan character had the strongest attraction for him. “These scenes, you think,” he says “are all too somber. So, indeed, they are; but the blame must rest on the somber spirit of our forefathers, who wove their web of life with hardly a single thread of rose-color or gold, — and not on me, who have a tropic love of sunshine, and would gladly gild all the world with it, if I knew where to find so much. That you may believe me,” he continues, “I will exhibit one of the only class of scenes in which our ancestors were wont to steep their tough old hearts in wine and strong drink, and indulge in an outbreak of frisky jollity.” And he introduces us to a funeral procession! “Even so; but look back through all the social customs of New England, in the first century of her existence, and read all her traits of character; and if you find one occasion, other than a funeral feast, where jollity was sanctioned by universal practice, I will set fire to my puppet- show without another word.” In forming an estimate of Hawthorne, such passages as these must not be left out of account. The tropic love of sunshine belonged to him individually, but the somber web of Puritan life belonged to him likewise, by virtue of his descent; and from their marriage in his character was born that half-sportive, half-melancholy humor that glimmers along his pages, like the tender light of morning upon the stern surface of New England granite. The history of Main street is followed only as far as the great snow of 1717, and we have a parting glimpse of “Goodman Massey taking his last walk, — often pausing, — often leaning over his staff — and calling to mind whose dwelling stood at such and such a spot, and whose field or garden occupied the site of these more recent houses. He can render a reason for all the bends and deviations of the thoroughfare, which, in its flexible and plastic infancy, was made to swerve aside from a straight line in order to visit every settler’s door. The main street is still youthful; the coëval man is in his latest age. Soon he will be gone, a patriarch of four-score; yet shall retain a sort of infantile life, in our local history, as the first town-born child.” Salem has probably changed as slowly and as little as any town in New England; and yet, when I visited it last winter, it no HDT WHAT? INDEX
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longer hinted of that New England which “must have been a dismal abode for the man of pleasure, since the only boon-companion was Death.” The main street is now quite a lively and progressive- looking thoroughfare, lined with handsome, albeit unpretentious brick and stone buildings, and with a horse-car track lying complacently along its length, above the forgotten footsteps of Squaw Sachem and the red Chief Wappacowet, and the crimson trail of Ann Coleman. There are town-halls and music-halls, and advertisements of the last new dramatic and operatic celebrities. There were inviting shops, full of Christmas goods and finery, and numbers of young ladies and gentlemen, in quite un-Puritanical garb, tripping gayly along the sidewalks, and not at all afraid of bewitching one another. Elderly persons there were, also, with gray hair and wrinkled faces, and some of them looking unmirthful enough too, but not with the sturdy religious solemnity of their forefathers. The inhabitants of Salem, however, are much more a race apart — their features and demeanor belong much more to a special and recognizable type — than is the case in the neighboring city of Boston, for instance. A few faces I saw that, so far as their physical conformation was concerned, only needed the Puritan doublet and skull-cap to answer very well for the contemporaries of Winthrop and Roger Williams; and I remember a policeman, with a white pointed beard, a conical helmet, and a dark cloak, who might almost have walked out of the seventeenth century just as he was. But, upon the whole, had Salem not been my home in infancy, were I not tolerably familiar with its history and associations, and bound to it by ties of kindred, I doubt whether I should find in it anything more than a rather dull and monotonous town, in which one might live without living, and die almost without being aware of it. With the exception of the houses in Essex street, and a few structures of a public or commercial character scattered here and there, Salem seems principally composed of wooden clapboarded houses, of rather old-fashioned build, with hip roofs, and painted a sober drab or buff color. The larger number of these edifices must date back at least as far as the beginning of this century, and many doubtless much further. The more ancient portion of the town lies eastward from the railway station and southward from Essex street. Parallel with Essex street, and next to it, runs Charter street, on which is the old grave-yard mentioned in “The Dolliver Romance” and in “Doctor Grimshawe.” Parallel with this again, and skirting the wharfs, extends Derby street, named after old King Derby, mentioned in “The Custom House,” introductory to “The Scarlet Letter”; its eastern extremity is at the Custom House, its western merges at right angles with Centre street, and in the vicinity stands the Town Pump. Numerous cross streets go from Essex street toward two wharfs. One of these is called Union street, neat, quiet, and narrow, though with a sidewalk on each side. On the western side, within a hundred yards of the corner, stands the house in which Nathaniel Hawthorne was born. It is a plain clapboarded structure of small size, with a three-cornered root, and a HDT WHAT? INDEX
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single large chimney in the midst. The front is flush with the sidewalk, and the high stone door-steps jut forth beyond. It has evidently been repaired, and now presents a very well-kept appearance; some additions have perhaps been built on in the rear, but it remains substantially unchanged, — an eight-roomed house, with an attic in the gable, painted a quiet drab hue, with pale-green shutters to the windows. A little yard or garden, about equal in area to the house, adjoins it on the north. There is, I am happy to say, no inscription above the door or elsewhere to arrest the curious attention of the passer- by. This spot was the birthplace of a genius, but the genius itself never had its abiding-place here. It belongs to a world in which there are no places, and no time, but only love and knowledge. Westward from Union street lies Herbert street; and the house in which Hawthorne lived with his widowed mother and sisters after his return from Bowdoin College stands here, the back yards of the two dwellings communicating. In the old time, Union and Herbert streets seem to have been practically one thoroughfare; for it was in the Herbert street house that the words, “In this dismal chamber FAME was won. — Salem, Union street,” were written. The house is of more irregular form than the other, and has probably been subjected to greater alterations. The room in which Hawthorne wrote the “Twice-told Tales” is in the upper story or attic. The place was doubtless quiet enough in those days; but now there are a school and a church or chapel on the opposite side of the street. It was “recess” as I passed by, and forty or fifty boys were creating such a hubbub in the school-yard as would have destroyed the most genial inspiration. But it seems a marvel that such stories should have been written here, under conditions however favorable. They have, indeed, “the pale tint of flowers that have blossomed in too retired a shade”; but how, in such a shade, did they come to blossom at all? The mind, one would think, must have some external stimulus — some sympathy and enjoyment in surrounding objects — in order to become creative; but for Hawthorne there was nothing but the night and the day, the sunshine and the rain, the changes of the seasons, the leaves of the forest and the waves of the sea, — the simple features and processes of nature, in short, — to quicken and nourish his imagination. The human life around him was as nearly colorless as it could be. But there appears to be much the same sort of difference between some men and others that exists between a sun and its satellites. The former shines in itself, by its own resources; the latter are bright only by derivation. Hawthorne evolved his exquisite creations in a social desert, and the physical unresponsiveness and barrenness of his surroundings only served to render what he produced more pure and permanent. There is hardly any attempt at color in them; their beauty is in their form. The enjoyment inspired by form is perhaps loftier and less subject to change, albeit also less intense, than the delight of color, which is mainly dependent on temperament and emotion; but be that as it may, it is well for the artist, — HDT WHAT? INDEX
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whether he work with pen or pencil, profoundly to verse himself in the intellectual laws of form before venturing to admit the passionate license of color. The genius of Hawthorne seems to have been providentially protected and trained, so that it might attain its full growth and strength in an orderly manner, without haste or eccentricity. Those lonely years in Salem were wearisome, no doubt, and often somber; but they wrought a strength and a self-poise in the solitary writer which all the splendor and phantasmagory of the world afterward could enrich and sweeten, but not mislead. In one way or another, all men who are destined to enter deeply into the mysteries of human life are led through a probationary period of solitude and fasting. They must explore the lonely and appalling recesses of the world within themselves before they are admitted to the world without. Hawthorne, during those ten years, breathed and walked in the Salem of his day, but lived in the Salem of one and two centuries before. There he found a largeness of material, a ruggedness of light and shade, and an atmosphere that played into the hands, so to speak, of his native imagination. The historical scenes that he draws, as in “The Gray Champion,” or the “Legends of the Province House,” though they are as vivid and broad and full of movement as a picture by Meissonier, manifestly owe their charm and effect not to any realism or literalness of detail, but purely to the imaginative power of the writer. The real scene did not look like this, but this is the essence and purport of the real scene. It has the beauty and it gives the delight of a work of fine art: all the disproportionate elements, the obtrusive accidents, the insignificancies of matter-of-fact, are refined away. And the bulk of the tales belonging to this period have scarcely any foothold upon earth at all. They are not lyrical, — the record of moods; but they are the moral speculations, or rather conclusions, of a mind singularly penetrating, just, and mature, — of a mind so healthy and well- balanced that its lack of practical experience enhanced instead of diminishing its faculty of dispassionate analysis. “In youth,” Hawthorne remarks, “men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may not be idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago.” The experience of age should be interpreted by the intuitions of youth; and this is broadly the gist of Hawthorne’s literary history, as traced in his literary achievements. The truth which he divined in his youth was the touchstone of his later knowledge, and gave unity to his career. From Herbert street it is but a few steps to the Custom House, in the upper apartments of which was made the momentous discovery of Mr. Surveyor Pue’s literary remains, and of the original scarlet letter, the history whereof has become more or less familiar to the educated fraction of Christendom. The building is doubtless essentially the same as it was forty years ago. Here is still the spacious edifice of brick, with the banner of the Republic — the thirteen stripes turned vertically instead of horizontally, and thus indicating that a civil and HDT WHAT? INDEX
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not a military sort of Uncle Sam’s government is here established — floating or drooping, in breeze. or calm, from the loftiest point of its roof. Over the entrance, moreover, still hovers the enormous specimen of the American eagle, with the thunderbolts and arrows in each claw; she is heavily gilded, and appears to be in a remarkably good state of preservation. Here too is the flight of wide granite steps descending toward the street; and the portico of half a dozen wooden pillars, supporting a balcony. The entrance door was closed at the time of my visit, and the neighborhood quite as deserted as it ever could have been in Hawthorne’s day. As for the row of venerable figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, tipped on their hind legs back against the wall, I made no effort to discover them; nor did I attempt to explore a certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a lofty height, decorated with cobwebs and dingy paint, and its floor strewn with gray sand. The room was doubtless there, but in these days of progress and Morris wall-papers, its interior might have been painfully unrecognizable. In truth, I forbore to enter the Custom House at all. A more forlorn, defunct, vacant-looking place I never beheld; and yet it is the scene of one of the most charmingly humorous and picturesque pieces of autobiographical writing in our language. The alchemy of genius never attempted to transmute baser metal than this into gold, or succeeded better. “The Custom House” is a fitting introduction to “The Scarlet Letter.” The original depravity of matter in the former, and of the spirit in the latter, are respectively exalted by the magic of imagination into fascination and tragic beauty. The rambling length of Derby street lay before me, and I traversed its lonely, mean, and uneventful extent as far as its junction with Central street. There is more liveliness here; the houses that surround the little square are less like dwellings of the dead, and the atmosphere is not so much that of a drab- colored Puritan Sunday as in other parts of the town. Here, as aforesaid, is the present town pump; but the original town pump, as appears by the stage direction at the beginning of that famous little monologue, stood at the corner of Essex and Washington streets. In Felt’s “Annals” there is a wood engraving of the latter splendid thoroughfare, resembling the streets which children were wont to construct with the German toy houses that came packed in oval wooden boxes: a remarkable coach, foreshortened, with two trunks behind and a horse three or four yards in front, occupies the central foreground; the windows of the houses are five feet in height by eighteen inches in width, and are all furnished with black shutters, closed; eight or nine ladies, gentlemen, and children, in the poke bonnets and high- collared coats of the year 1839, are solemnly posed at different points along either sidewalk. Across the lower middle distance runs Essex street, indicated by two parallel lines; and on the corner at the spectator’s right stands the town pump, with two symmetrical handles, and a large trough. “Little was it expected,” writes the worthy Mr. Felt, “when this fountain was HDT WHAT? INDEX
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opened and fitted for use, that locomotives, like some monstrous leviathan, would sweep over the bed of its waters, and pour out fire and smoke, instead of the element designed to subdue them.... A cistern was ordered near the first church, in lieu of ’the old town pump,’ which Mr. Hawthorne, one of our city’s gifted sons, has given a prominent place among his eloquent and impressive tales.” The fact was, that the Eastern Railway ran a tunnel underneath Washington street, and the fountains of the great pump were thus dried up, or at any rate diverted. From Central street I took my way back along Charter street, and soon came to an open space on the right, some three acres in extent, filled with grave-stones, and known as the Charter street burying-ground. On one corner of the inclosure, fronting the street, but partly infringing on the grave-yard, stands an old house which was once occupied by Doctor Peabody, the father of Mrs. Hawthorne; but which, in the world of romance, was the abode of Doctor Grimshawe and the two mysterious children, Elsie and Ned, and possibly, also, of good old Grandsir Dolliver and little Pansie. The description given in “Grimshawe” is tolerably exact, — quite as nearly so as might he expected of a place which one had not seen for eight or ten years, and which needed a certain picturesque glamour to make it harmonize with the story. “Doctor Grimshawe’s residence,” we are told, “cornered on a grave-yard, with which the house communicated by a back door.... It did not appear to be an ancient structure, nor one that would ever have been the abode of a very wealthy or prominent family — a three-story wooden house, perhaps a century old, low- studded, with a square front, standing right upon the street; and a small inclosed porch, containing the main entrance, affording a glimpse up and down the street through an oval window on each side. Its characteristic was decent respectability, not sinking below the boundary of the genteel.... A sufficient number of rooms and chambers, low, ill-lighted, ugly, but not unsusceptible of warmth and comfort, the sunniest and cheerfulest of which were on the side that looked into the graveyard.” All that applies well enough to the present Charter street house. It is of a whitish hue, irregular in plan, and about as commonplace as an old wooden house can well be. It seems, moreover, to have sunk somewhat below that genteel level which it held to in the doctor’s day. It looks as if it might be unclean inside, though by no means with the appalling and portentous griminess that characterizes it in the Romance; and I doubt if there be a spider as big as a nickel in the whole building. Dreary the entire spot undeniably is, especially under such conditions as those in which I beheld it, — a cold, gray sky, a harsh, inclement breeze, and a dull whiteness of snow underfoot. The snow, however, did not prevent an examination of the grave-stones, for these were all upright; there were no horizontal ones, such as that which marked the resting-place of him of the Bloody Footstep. I suspect, moreover, that were the sexton to tell all he knows, it would transpire that some of these head-stones are not the bona fide original slabs that were HDT WHAT? INDEX
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erected at the dates engraved upon them. They are reproductions, more or less accurate; some archaeologist, desirous of preserving the historic records of the town, has perhaps resorted to this somewhat questionable mode of achieving his purpose. Most of the slabs are thin parallelograms of slate, the inscriptions being as fresh as if cut last week. The words, in order to carry out the illusion, are sometimes spelt in the old fashion, and the device of a death’s head, or a cherub, is roughly traced on the top of the stone. One of the first graves I came upon was that of Doctor John Swinnerton, the famous quack physician, and predecessor of Grandsir Dolliver, — the man who concocted the drink of immortality, which was to have restored that venerable personage to the vigor and elasticity of his long-vanished youth. Doctor Swinnerton expired, according to this record, in the year 1690. Undoubtedly, he was a real person. In Felt’s “Annals” it is stated that “a Brinsley Accidence, with the name of John Swinnerton, supposed to be the physician, of Salem, written in it in 1652, came into the possession of Rev. Dr. Bentley, who left it to William B. Fowle, Esq., of Boston.” And in the chapter about the Salem schools, it appears that on the twenty-fifth of March, 1716, “John Swinnerton began to keep the English school by the town house, at the usual compensation,” — a son, evidently, of the mystic doctor, and, so far as records go, the last of his tribe. The schoolteacher’s salary, in those days, seems to have been about twenty-five dollars a year. This use of a real Salem name, by the bye, constantly occurs in Hawthorne’s writings. In my strolling about the town, I recognized several over the shop-windows; and others appear in the index of Felt’s “Annals.” Thus Ethan Brand, Mr. Bullfinch, Clifford, Dixey, Goldthwaite, Gookin, Holgrave, Hollingsworth, Jeffrey, Maule, Pinchion or Pynchon, and others, were all, at one time or another, residents of Salem. But Doctor John Swinnerton seems to have been, for some reason, a favorite personage with my father; mention of him occurs not only in “The Dolliver Romance,” but also in “Grimshawe,” in the introductory chapter to “The House of the Seven Gables,” and, I think, in one or two of the shorter pieces. It is all of a piece with his predominating love of veracity, which, as he more than once intimates, is by no means inconsistent with the pursuit of fiction. The novel, he says, “is presumed to aim at a very minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and ordinary, course of man’s experience.” The romance, “while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and while it sins unpardonably so far as it may swerve aside from the truth of the human heart, has fairly a right to present that truth under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’s own choosing or creation.... He will be wise, no doubt, to make a very moderate use of the privileges here stated and, especially, to mingle the marvelous rather as a slight, delicate, and evanescent flavor, than as a portion of the actual substance of the dish offered to the public.” In another place he says that HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“he designed the story and the characters to bear, of course, a certain relation to human nature and human life, but still to be so artfully and airily removed from our mundane sphere, that some laws and proprieties of their own should be implicitly and insensibly acknowledged.” Miss E. P. Peabody, in a letter referring to the “Twice-told Tales,” writes: “Nathaniel Hawthorne made a discovery, which was that we might be taken out of the prose of life into the region of the ’perfect good and fair,’ — and into the mysteries of the Inferno as well, — without transcending the common boundaries of daily life. He did not waste his imagination in making circumstances; he was deficient in invention; but all his imagination was employed in discovering what depths of passion, what agonies of conscience, what exquisite emotions underlie our nature, and witness to the ever present God. He left the vulgar ground invented by human will, and kept himself in that spiritual region where imagination is native and at home. He would take the most ordinary and probable circumstances imaginable, or an historical fact perhaps, and lift the veil and show and explain the play of eternal laws that made the facts and personages what they were.” Some novelists, when in search of fresh and unhackneyed material, make journeys to foreign lands, or to out-of-the-way corners of their own. Hawthorne’s journeys were always inward, beneath the surface of things; but, like Jason in his passage through the labyrinth of Crete, he found it well to hold in his hand the silken clew or cord which connected him with the daylight world without, and enabled him to shape his course aright, and not lose himself in vague wanderings and speculations. To bestow the names of actual persons upon his imaginary creations was perhaps one of the means that he adopted to this end, — one of his reminders to himself to keep, as he expresses it, “undeviatingly within his immunities.” The Matthew Maule of the “Seven Gables” has perhaps (and perhaps, not) a partial prototype in a certain Thomas Maule mentioned in the historic annals of Salem. This Thomas was a Quaker, and in 1669 Samuel Robinson and Samuel Shalocke were fined twenty shillings apiece for “entertayninge of him.” Maule was warned to depart, but “he persevered, then and subsequently, in retaining his abode here.” In 1714, “among claims for common land, Thomas Maule presented one for a place where his two shops were burnt; and in 1724 an order was issued for John Maule to pay eight pounds which his father left as a bequest to the town, three pounds of which were specified for the writing-school.” Evidently Thomas Maule’s fate was not so tragic as that of the fictitious Matthew; but he seems to have had a touch of the latter’s obstinacy. The curse which Matthew is described as having launched against his enemy, the Puritan Colonel Pyncheon, “God will give him blood to drink!” is, however, historical, so far as the words go; but they were uttered by a woman, under circumstances mentioned, I think, in the note-books. Indeed, I am not sure that my own ancestor, Colonel John Hathorne, did not represent the Colonel Pyncheon of the occasion. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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In the note-books, under date of 1838, allusion is made to the grave of this “Colonel John Hathorne, Esq.,” and the head-stone is described as being sunk deep into the earth and leaning forward, with the grass growing very long around it; “and on account of the moss it was rather difficult to make out the date.” But the stone, as I saw it fifty-four years later, was as upright as if it had been put in place yesterday, and the inscription was quite clear of moss and perfectly legible. The hand of the renovator must have been at work, but it has performed its office with unusual forbearance and discretion. The passage above quoted from goes on to say: “It gives strange ideas to think how convenient to Dr. Peabody’s residence the burial-ground is — the monuments standing almost within reach of the side-windows of the parlor, and there being a little gate from the back yard through which we step forth upon those old graves aforesaid.” So we read in “Doctor Grimshawe” how the grave-yard communicated with the house by a back door, “so that with a hop, skip, and jump from the threshold, across a flat tombstone, the two children were in the habit of using the dismal cemetery as their play-ground.” A couple of old apple-trees are spoken of; but these have disappeared, and the ground is planted with a few young elms. The south side of the inclosure is occupied by a line of low out-houses. I might have prolonged indefinitely my desultory rambles about Salem, or this description of them; but, as the reader will long ago have perceived, there is really little or nothing. to be said very pertinent to the matter ostensibly in hand. To repeat what I began with saying, material objects and associations are but the portals through which entrance is made into the region peopled and enriched by Hawthorne’s genius. There is a certain pleasure — to the writer if not to the reader — in putting one’s self; so far as may be practicable, in Hawthorne’s physical stand-point, and thus testing, as it were, by practical experiment, the penetration of his insight and the creativeness of his imagination. But it is impossible, for me at least, as the foregoing pages abundantly testify, to adhere to the letter of my undertaking in this article, or to avoid taking up and discussing side-issues, and indulging in unpremeditated speculations. Hawthorne existed in Salem, but he lived, to all vital intents and purposes, somewhere else, whither no railway can convey the investigator, and whereof no guide-book hitherto published contains any information. In the paper still to come, I shall follow his foot-steps through Concord, Boston, and Brook Farm. Julian Hawthorne. HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1888
January: Julian Hawthorne’s review of H.G.O. Blake’s WINTER excerpts from Henry Thoreau’s journal appeared in Bookmart. At the time the trade winds were blowing in favor of derogation of Thoreau and so Julian’s article of course carried this derogation to new excesses of eloquence:
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1890
During the 1890s angry union miners would be storming the lease prisons of the sovereign state of Tennessee, in what would be termed the “Coal Creek Rebellion,” releasing over 400 prisoners from their forced labors in order to load them aboard trains to the state capital. This state would eventually be forced to abandon its lease labor system, a precedent which would encourage other states as well to regulate or restrict or abolish the use of prison labor by private enterprise. (No siree Bob, we weren’t gonna be like those damn Nazis, not here in the U S of A we weren’t! Nope! This sort of thing is simply foreign to us and to our heritage. :-) LEASED PRISONS
Here is an undated clipping from the Minneapolis Tribune, of approximately this period: An old Concordian has favored me with some of the village impressions of Julian Hawthorne and others of that semi-Pagan annex to the Hub. “Did you know Thoreau?” I asked. “I should say I did. We used to go, at his invitation, on huckle-excursions with him. We used to call him ‘Henry.’ Some of the town’s people didn’t like him at all, and thought him a sort of hermit boor, but he was very kind to children. He loved birds and the woods, and hated to see birds shot or rabbits trapped. He would not have harmed a fly. His rustication out on the shore of Walden Pond was a good deal of an affectation. He would have starved, if it had not been that his sisters and mother cooked up pies and doughnuts and sent them to him in a basket. The trouble with Thoreau was that he tried to live on an intellectual east wind. He died young, but would have lived on for years had his diet been roast beef and mutton chops. Thoreau was a good deal of a wag in a quiet humorous way. He once put cloth bandages on the claws of Mrs. Emerson’s hens, that good lady having been sorely tried by her fowls invading the family flower patch. I guess Mrs. Emerson invented the notion of gloving her hens, and Thoreau carried out her instructions to the letter, and then went off and had his laugh out.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1891
Mrs. George Parsons Lathrop and her husband embraced Roman Catholicism. She chose as a mission the work of helping penniless sufferers from incurable cancer and went to live in New-York slums to be near them. She founded St. Rose’s Free Home for Incurable Cancer there.
Julian Hawthorne’s and William Leonard Lemmon’s AMERICAN LITERATURE: A TEXT-BOOK FOR THE USE OF SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES (Boston: D.C. Heath & Co.) contained unattributed personal observations about Henry Thoreau to the accuracy of which neither author would have been able to testify. By having had the HDT WHAT? INDEX
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ability to “fix his gaze upon an object for a long time at a stretch,” Thoreau had been “like a pointer-dog.”
HENRY, STILL POINTING
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) had the initial distinction of being born in Concord, though that village was then nothing but a pretty hamlet, lying between level meadows and low hills, on the banks of a loitering stream. Here, it is true, the first blood of the Revolution had been shed, more than forty years HDT WHAT? INDEX
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before; but that fact might have lapsed into oblivion had not Emerson’s “Hymn,” recited on the site of the conflict, in 1836, put a life into the event that is still vigorous. Thoreau was, remotely, of French extraction, and he had a swarthy, Norman cast of features: but his ancestors had become English before they became American, and the genuine New England farmer blood beat in his veins. Personally, he was odd, in all senses of the term. He was bilious in constitution and in temper, with a disposition somewhat prone to suspicion and jealousy, and defiant, rather than truly independent, in spirit. He had a searching, watchful, unconciliating eye, a long, stealthy tread and an alert but not graceful figure. His heart was neither warm nor large, and he certainly did not share that “enthusiasm for humanity” which was the fashionable profession in his day. His habits were solitary and unsocial; yet secretly he was highly sensitive to the opinion of his fellow-men, and would perhaps have mingled more freely with them, but for a perception that there was no vehement demand for his company. The art of pleasing was not innate in him, and he was too proud to cultivate it. Rather than have it appear that society could do without him, he resolved to make haste and banish society; for a couple of years he actually lived alone in a hut built by himself, on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord: all his life he kept out of people’s way, — you were more apt to see his disappearing coat-tails than his face, and he was most at ease in his walks through the woods and fields surrounding Concord, and on his exploring tramps to Canada, to Maine, to Cape Cod and along the Merrimac [sic] River. Thus thrown back upon himself, his egotism and self-consciousness could not but become emphasized: and since he might not shine in society, he determined to be king in the wilderness. He asserted, and perhaps brought himself to believe, that all that was worthy in this world lay within the compass of a walk from his own doorstep; and we might add that he came to regard the owner of that doorstep as the centre of all this world’s worth. Existing in space, as it were, with nothing to measure himself by, he seemed to himself colossal. Had Thoreau been nothing more than has been indicated, the world would not have been likely to hear of him. But there was more in him than this, and more still was added by education and by the influence of certain of his contemporaries, and of their opinions. His father was able to send him to school and to Harvard College: after graduating he taught school, and finally learned surveying. This trade, and a little money that he had, sufficed to support one of habits so economical as his. He was endowed with some imagination, and it partly found expression in poetry- moralized descriptions of nature, a little rough in form, and anything but ardent in feeling, but individual and masculine. Several of these poems, written soon after Thoreau left college, were published in “The Dial,” and also some essays on the natural history of Massachusetts. Emerson was the medium of this early literary recognition, and his contact with the odd and whimsical young man who had so few intimates inevitably had HDT WHAT? INDEX
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an effect upon Thoreau’s development, both literary and philosophical. He did not want to imitate anybody, and he did his best to digest Emerson, so that his own work and cast of thought should not betray the contagion. Measurably, but not completely, he succeeded. His writings are thinly overspread with Thoreau, but here and there the coating has worn off, and the Emersonian basis shows through. It is quite open to question whether this has not done the writings more harm than good. The nectar and ambrosia of Emerson does not assimilate kindly with Thoreau’s harsh and rather acrid substance. Thoreau was a humorist, -in the old, not in the new sense,- and it is indispensable to the prosperity of the humorist that he be himself. He was no optimist, and he cared nothing for the welfare of mankind, or the progress of civilization. When, therefore, he ornaments his records of the facts of nature with interpretations of their moral and spiritual significance, we feel a sense of incongruity. The interpretations have not the air of developing spontaneously from the interior of the writer’s thought; they are deliberately fitted on from the outside, and the marks of juncture smoothed off. On the other hand, it did come naturally to Thoreau to fall into a vein of talking about natural objects -plants, animals and meteorology- as if they were human creatures, and to credit them with likes, dislikes, thoughts and personalities. When he does this, he is entertaining and attractive, and it is a pity he did not develop a vein so proper to him, rather than snatch with his earthly hands at the Empyrean. His poems of observation were good, and, like a pointer-dog, he could fix his gaze upon an object for a long time at a stretch. Nevertheless, he cannot be considered an especially objective writer. He reverts continually to himself, and examines his own attitude and impressions in regard to the thing even more solicitously than the thing itself. The poet in him helps the naturalist, but the philosopher sophisticates him. Now and then, in the midst of the pathless woods, we are aware of a queer bookish flavor in the air. The literary artist arranges his little scene, pleasing in its way, and well done; only it was not just the kind of pleasure we were looking for. Other and greater artists can do that better: what we want of Thoreau is his own peculiar service, and nothing else. In truth, he was not free from affectations; he was radically provincial; and often (as children complain of one another) he was “disagreeable.” But he had deep and true thoughts, he was of pure and upright life and he made a real and lasting impression. He deserves the reputation that he has with the average reader, though not the violent panegyrics of his thick- and-thin admirers. He assumed the stoicism and some of the habits of the Indian, and his physical senses were approximately as acute as theirs; but he was really a civilized man who never found a home in civilization. One leaves him with a feeling of unmixed kindliness; and in his “Walden,” his “Week on the Concord and Merrimac,” [sic] his “Cape Cod” and other books, HDT WHAT? INDEX
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will be found many passages worthy of preservation, which only he could have written. AMERICAN LITERATURE HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1892
April: Julian Hawthorne’s “Walking” appeared in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine: A Popular Journal of General Literature (J.B. Lippincott and Co.). This was a derogation of the advice Henry Thoreau had offered in his 1851 lecture of that same title, that “one ought to have no definite end or aim in view, nor any specified measure of time.” This was “merely a piece of Thoreau affectation derived from Emersonianism and spoilt in the derivation.” In point of fact, “one of the most self-conscious of men,” Thoreau “never practiced what he preached.” For us to heed Thoreau’s advice, taking seriously his famous essay “WALKING”, would amount to a “return to mere animalism.” The profound reason why Henry was the Pied Piper, leading us to our doom: “Man must have a purpose and a hope, in order to compass an achievement.” Because one’s life must be goal- directed, because it is vital that one has hope, because to be a decent human being one must strive and achieve, Julian concludes, “Only an idiot or a madman could walk on the Thoreau principle.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1900
April 22, Sunday: For most years we don’t have any record, but early in 1901 someone at the Chicago Tribune made up a list of the lynchings which had occurred in America during the previous year. The list had 117 entries — a lynching, typically a white mob of some size hanging an adult black male, had been occurring every three days or so. Because of this list we know that on this day in Allentown, Florida, John Hughley, accused of having plotted to kill white people, was lynched.
Julian Hawthorne acknowledged in an article “Famous American Authors / Henry David Thoreau” for the Denver Sunday Post that: “Thoreau died two years after I returned to Concord, so that my personal knowledge of him was not great” (this may well be counted as the final true sentence the guy would utter, in which the name “Henry Thoreau” would appear). HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
1912
December: Julian Hawthorne, in his 60s, had been trading on the reputation of his father by offering 3,500,000 shares of stock in Canadian silver, gold, copper, and cobalt mines — mines that as he well knew had become nothing more than abandoned worthless holes in the ground. He along with a son of the ether dentist William Thomas Green Morton would be convicted of securities fraud by mail, and he would serve a sentence at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Georgia. For the remainder of his life he would reside in California, as isolated as he could get from all family and former friends. He would complain bitterly that the place was a mere warehouse rather than any sort of real “penitentiary,” in that during his entire period of incarceration, none of the prison officials had ever made the slightest attempt to rehabilitate him and rescue him from the error of his ways. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
(In a related piece of news, in this month Charles Dawson and Arthur Smith Woodward presented “Piltdown man,” not revealed as a forgery until 1953, to the Geological Society.) HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
1915
August 29, Sunday: Although Julian Hawthorne had acknowledged in 1900 that “Thoreau died two years after I returned to Concord, so that my personal knowledge of him was not great,” for the purposes of a newspaper article in the Boston American he confessed to something never before divulged: once upon a time he had surprised his cousin Horace Mann, Jr. and Henry Thoreau on one of their saunters by emerging suddenly “from behind a clump of laurel.” Thoreau of course recognized him, he added. When he asked Thoreau to “tell us where we can find Indian arrow-heads,” Thoreau nodded. At that moment he “began to love” Henry! “I could not help pouring out my soul, and Thoreau listened and relaxed; commented now and then, pointed out this or that; few words, but pregnant.” Because of “our walk,” Julian hypothesized, he had perhaps seen “a side of Thoreau not disclosed even to Emerson, Channing, or Alcott.”
He insisted quite falsely that when he had been a teenager in Concord, Thoreau’s famous hut still remained beside Walden Pond, although it had become dilapidated. It had been an inspiration to him! I used to stand and wish that it had been my lot to live in that manner. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
1923
December 12, Wednesday: Although Julian Hawthorne had acknowledged in 1900 that “Thoreau died two years after I returned to Concord, so that my personal knowledge of him was not great,” when stimulated to create an article for the Pasadena Star-News he suddenly recalled that as a child he had indeed had significant personal encounters with the famous Henry Thoreau! My first distinct recollection of him was when he surveyed our little estate at Concord, some twenty acres of hill, meadow and woodland. I saw the rather undersized, queer man coming along the road with his long steps carrying on his shoulder a queer instrument and looking very serious. I got down from the mulberry tree in which I was perched and watched his doing in silent absorption. Wherever he went I followed; neither of us spoke a word from first to last. Up the terraces with their apple trees, over the brow of the hill, into the wood and out again, down into the meadow to the brook, and so back to the house again. Finally my father came out and they talked a little, and my father paid him ten dollars, and Thoreau strode away, after remarking, with a glance at me, “That boy has more eyes than tongue.”9 NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
In fact, Julian now confessed, he had had such a close personal intimacy with Thoreau that Horace Mann, Jr. became jealous. While walking across a plowed field he had picked up a sharp-pointed and unbroken Indian arrowhead, one that cousin Horace had merely trodden upon! “Oh, Mr. Thoreau. Look!” He turned and examined it. “Good!” he said. “Sharp eyes.” He took me into favor thenceforward, and I don’t think Horace ever quite forgave me.
9. Although we can acknowledge that it is more than likely that Henry and Julian sighted each other on the occasion of the survey of the “The Wayside” plot (which Julian misdates to his age of eight, although in the year of this survey he had been sixteen), it is extremely unlikely that Thoreau would have made any comment similar to “That boy has more eyes than tongue” because, although one might imagine such a comment being made about one or another tongue-tied 8-year-old, it is simply not the sort of remark that anyone would ever make about any teener — no matter how sullen and comatose that teener. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
1927
August 20, Saturday: Julian Hawthorne’s “Thoreau – Genius of the Woods” appeared in the Dearborn Independent. In this account of his personal relationship with the famous Henry Thoreau, Julian has Henry remark to Nathaniel Hawthorne not “That boy has more eyes than tongue” (as he had alleged in 1923), but instead “Good boy! sharp eyes, and no tongue!” –and by this year he has forgotten that in 1900 he had admitted that “Thoreau died two years after I returned to Concord, so that my personal knowledge of him was not great,” and affirms that he and Thoreau had then become friends: “I was admitted to his friendship.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
1934
July 21, Saturday: Julian Hawthorne died in San Francisco, California. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
1938
Yvor Winters, in MAULE’S CURSE; SEVEN STUDIES IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICAN OBSCURANTISM: HAWTHORNE, COOPER, MELVILLE, POE, EMERSON, JONES VERY, EMILY DICKINSON, HENRY JAMES (Norfolk CT: New Directions).
In a similar genre, the widowed Edith Garrigues Hawthorne generated THE MEMOIRS OF JULIAN HAWTHORNE for Macmillan. In this book Son-Of-Hawthorne is made to iterate yet again for our benefit from beyond the grave, various of his intrepid confabulations: Once, when I was nearly seven years old [We know from Thoreau’s survey book that said survey actually took place while Julian was 16 years of age], Thoreau came to the Wayside to make a survey of our land, bringing his surveying apparatus on his shoulder. I watched the short, dark, unbeautiful man with interest and followed him about, all over the place, never losing sight of a movement and never asking a question or uttering a word. The thing must have lasted a couple of hours; when we got back, Thoreau remarked to my father: “Good boy! Sharp eyes, and no tongue!” On that basis I was admitted to his friendship; a friendship or comradeship which began in 1852 and was to last until his death in 1862 [Actually we know of no other occasion on which Julian came within eyesight of Thoreau]. In our walks about the country, Thoreau saw everything, and would indicate the invisible to me with a silent nod of the head. The brook that skirted the foot of our meadow was another treasure-house which he discovered to me, though he was too shy to companion me there; when he had given me a glimpse of Nature in her privacy, he left me alone with her ... on a hot August day, I would often sit, hidden from the world, thinking boy thoughts. I learned how to snare chub, and even pickerel, with a loop made of a long-stemmed grass; dragon-flies poised like humming-birds, and insects skated zigzag on the surface, casting odd shadows on the bottom.... Yes, Thoreau showed me things, and though it didn’t aid me in the Harvard curriculum [Julian became a student of civil engineering, but the college asked him to leave and there would be no diploma], it helped me through life. Truly, Nature absorbed his attention, but I don’t think he cared much for what is called the beauties of nature; it was her way of working, her mystery, her economy in extravagance; he delighted to trace her footsteps toward their source.... He liked to feel that the pursuit was endless, with mystery at both ends of it.... HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
Louisa May Alcott had been nursing at a military hospital in Washington DC when Henry David Thoreau died. Julian’s posthumous memoir tells an interesting story about the provenance of her poem “Thoreau’s Flute.” Allegedly, when Louisa got back to Concord, one night she snuck up to the Wayside home of the Hawthornes and left a copy on the steps “held in place by a pebble.” Hawthorne then forwarded the poem to James T. Fields in Boston so it could be published anonymously in The Atlantic Monthly.
We sighing said, “Our Pan is dead— His pipe hangs mute beside the river, Around it friendly moonbeams quiver, But music’s airy voice is fled. Spring comes to us in guise forlorn, The blue-bird chants a requiem, The willow-blossom waits for him, The genius of the wood is gone” Then from the flute, untouched by hands, There came a low, harmonious breath: For such as he there is no death. His life the eternal life commands. Above men’s aims his nature rose. The wisdom of a just content Make one small spot a continent, And turned to poetry life’s prose Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild, Swallow and aster, lake and pine To him seemed human or divine, Fit mates for this large-hearted child. Such homage nature ne’er forgets; And yearly on the coverlid ’Neath which her darling lieth hid Will write his name in violets. To him no vain regrets belong Whose soul, that finer instrument, Gave to the world no poor lament, But wood-notes ever sweet and strong. Oh lonely friend, He still will be A potent presence, though unseen, Steadfast, sagacious and serene. Seek not for him: he is with Thee.
And gosh, for some reason Julian had kept this a secret all his life only to allow it to be revealed after everyone involved was dead! HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
1993
T. Walter Herbert’s DEAREST BELOVED: THE HAWTHORNES AND THE MAKING OF THE MIDDLE-CLASS FAMILY. Berkeley: U of California P.10
“MAGISTERIAL HISTORY” IS FANTASIZING: HISTORY IS CHRONOLOGY
10. The relationship between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne has been characterized as a model loving relationship. That’s not the way I reconstruct it. I see the two of them as inveterate game-players, dancing around in very tight and lifelong circles of one-uppance the obvious payoff for which was that everyone, literally everyone, in their lives had to wait on them hand and foot, while meanwhile they manipulatively struggled to protect themselves from becoming utterly subservient to each other’s manipulations. In the husband’s case, of course, the scam was that his writing came first, he being the family breadwinner, and also, it was ever so important to defer to him, to put his person always first, because his was such an artistic, sensitive soul and such sensitivities might so readily be bruised by reality. He was so shy, he was so solitary, he was so perceptive — except when he was out drinking with his buddies and could let his shyness, his solitude, his perceptiveness, and his other self-serving poses, slip away. In the wife’s case, on the other hand, she obviously needed to sit around in the parlor and have plural maidservants to run errands for her, because anytime anything disagreeable would come up, such as a household chore, or some distressingly otiose idea, or some sudden noise, she could acquire the most splitting of headaches. Nathaniel was denying himself so totally for his lovey- lovey Sophia, and Sophia was denying herself so totally for her lovey-lovey Nathaniel! –it must have been such a pain to hear them go at it! The chickens would come home to roost in the next generation after this self-legitimating and self-deceiving co-conspiracy, in the warped and spoiled self-indulgent adult lives of their offspring Una and Julian and in the exceedingly difficult life of Rose. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2015. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: January 22, 2015 HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button. HDT WHAT? INDEX
JULIAN HAWTHORNE JULIAN HAWTHORNE
Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with