Part 18

Since Tennyson's elevation to the peerage there has been an infinite amount of squibbing at his expense, and some very good parodies upon his poems have been circulated. The "Pall Mall Gazette" parodies "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" thus:--

"Baron Alfred Vere de Vere, Of me you win no new renown: You thought to daze the country-folk And cockneys when you came to town. See Wordsworth, Shelley, Cowper, Burns, Withdraw in scorn, and sit retired; The last of some six hundred earls Is not a place to be desired.

"Baron Alfred Vere de Vere, We thought you proud to bear your name; Your pride is yet no mate for ours, Too proud to think a title fame. We had the genius--not the lord; We love the poet's truer charms, A simple singer with his dreams Is worth a hundred coats-of-arms."

And so on to the close:--

"Alfred, Alfred Vere de Vere, If time be heavy on your hands, Are there no toilers in our streets, Nor any poor in all these lands? Oh, teach the weak to strive and hope; Oh, teach the great to help the low; Pray Heaven for a noble heart, And let the foolish title go."

There was undoubtedly much disappointment that Tennyson did not refuse the title bestowed upon him, as he had previously declined to be knighted, and was looked upon as something of a liberal. He probably was this when young, judging by some things in his writings; but he is now looked upon as a tory of the tories.

Tennyson has probably received higher prices for his poems than any other poet. When he was paid ten pounds a line for "Sea Dreams," it was considered a fabulous price; but he has received much more than that since.

During his long literary life--for he has been writing over fifty years--he has of course written a great deal; yet he is very slow and laborious in composition, and spends much time in rewriting and polishing. The garden song in "Maud" was rewritten fifty times, and almost as great labor has been given to other famous bits of writing. He was seventeen years in writing "In Memoriam," and he brought it almost to perfection of finish; but he has spent laborious years upon poems which are comparative failures. After the inspiration has waned, or if the inspiration is wanting in the first place, the pains taken in revision go for little in the making of a poem which will live. Given the inspiration, and the labor usually, though not always, adds to its chances for immortality. Tennyson, with all his fastidious delicacy in writing, is a robust, manly man,--strong, healthy, active, fond of out-of-door life, and not greatly given to study. He spends whole days in the open air, and has all an Englishman's fondness for walking. He is martial in spirit, too, and rejoices in the heroic deeds of his countrymen. He can write a spirited war song, as he proved a few years ago when he thrilled all England with the lyric:--

"Form, form, riflemen, form; Ready, be ready to meet the storm."

On the whole, Tennyson must be said to have had a very prosperous and well-ordered life. He has enjoyed more of the blessings of this world than almost any one of his famous contemporaries; and his name is likely to live after that of most of the others shall have passed away. He has had the appreciation and the applause of all of the great men of his time, and the friendship of such as he desired; and his old age is full of honor, and ministered unto by loving and faithful hands. May it still be long before an admiring world shall read at the end of his life's story the words, "IN MEMORIAM, ALFRED TENNYSON."

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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"His mother, a woman of fine gifts but extreme sensibility lost her husband in her twenty-eighth year; and from an exaggerated, almost Hindoo-like, construction of the law of seclusion which the public taste of that day imposed upon widows, she withdrew entirely from society and permitted the habit of solitude to grow upon her to such a degree that she actually remained a strict hermit to the end of her long life, or for more than forty years after Captain Hawthorne's death. Such behavior on the mother's part could not fail to have its effect upon the children. They had no opportunity to know what social intercourse meant; their peculiarities and eccentricities were at least negatively encouraged; they grew to regard themselves as something apart from the general world. It is saying much for the sanity and healthfulness of the minds of these three children, that their loneliness distorted their judgment--their perception of the relation of things--as little as it did."

The sister is described as having in many respects an intellect as commanding and penetrating as that of her brother, and yet she followed in the way of her mother and passed her life in almost complete seclusion, caring for nothing but the reading of books and the taking of long walks, sleeping always until noon, and sitting up until two or three o'clock in the morning in perfect solitude. She boarded for many years after her mother's death at a farm-house on the seashore, and could not be induced to come out, even to attend the funeral of her brother at Concord, although he was her pride and idol throughout life.

Had Hawthorne himself been less fortunate in his marriage, there is little doubt that his own peculiarities would have become exaggerated, perhaps even to the extent of those of his sister. But he married a woman who both understood and appreciated him, and whom he idolized. From this union grew all the happiness and success of his life. His son says:--

"To attempt to explain and describe his career without taking this event into consideration would be like trying to imagine a sun without heat or a day without a sun. Nothing seems less likely than that he should have accomplished his work in literature independently of her sympathy and companionship. Not that she afforded him any direct and literal assistance in the composition of his books and stories: her gifts were wholly unsuited to such employment, and no one apprehended more keenly than she the solitariness and uniqueness of his genius, insomuch that she would have deemed it something not far removed from profanation to have offered to advise or sway him in regard to his literary productions. She believed in his inspiration, and her office was to promote, as far as in her lay, the favorableness of the conditions under which it should manifest itself."

It was to this that she devoted her life,--to comfort, to cheer, to soothe, to inspire, to guard from all outward annoyances, the poetical and sensitive man who believed in her so implicitly and leaned upon her so confidently. They led a very quiet and secluded life during the most of his literary career, and seemed almost to resent any intrusion of the outside world upon them, not only as regarded persons, but even as regarded agitating questions and pressing ideas.

They took very slight interest in the questions which stirred New England life in their day, and held entirely aloof from the reforms which shook the social life around them from centre to foundation-stone. Indeed, he had a deep-seated dislike to the genus Reformer, and presented his picture of the whole race in "Hollingsworth." Perhaps he had known some individual reformer of that odious type, and out of this grew his dislike of the whole species. At any rate, the men--of whom New England was full at that time--who

"Blew the fiery breath of storm Through the hoarse trumpet of Reform"

never received much aid or sympathy from Nathaniel Hawthorne or his wife. Nor will they, apparently, from his son, who says of his father, "He was not a teetotaler any more than he was an abolitionist or a Thug."

But if their sympathies did not go out very widely to the outside world, there was the most perfect sympathy and companionship in the home life, and no more beautiful record of a perfect marriage has ever been made than this life of the Hawthornes presents. Yes, it was a happy life they led, these two in their married isolation, despite poverty and obscurity and a lack of appreciation in the early time, and of trial, from ill-health and other causes, in later years. He lived like Carlyle, a good deal in the shadows of his famous books, and was sometimes for months in the possession of the demon of composition. While composing "The Marble Faun" he thus writes in a letter:

"I sternly shut myself up, and come to close grips with the romance which I am trying to tear from my brain."

He was always discouraged about his work, and needed a deal of cheering regarding it. He says in one place:

"My own individual taste is for an altogether different class of books from what I write. If I were to meet with such books as mine by another writer, I do not believe I should be able to get through with them."

And again:--

"I will try to write a more genial book, but the Devil himself always gets into my inkstand, and I can only get him out by penfuls."

Still again:--

"Heaven sees fit to visit me with the unshakable conviction that all this series of articles is good for nothing. I don't think that the public will bear with much more of this sort of thing."

His letters are often full of this moody discouragement, though lighted up always by some gleams of his humor. For instance, he writes to Fields:--

"Do make some inquiries about Portugal,--in what part of the world it lies, and whether it is a Kingdom, an Empire, or a Republic. Also the expenses of living there, and whether the Minister would be much pestered with his own countrymen."

And later, when he was in Rome:--

"I bitterly detest this Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it adieu forever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has ever happened to it from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site of it had been obliterated before I ever saw it."

His complaints about his pens are really very amusing to those people--and their name is legion--who have had a like difficulty in pleasing themselves. He writes to Fields:--

"If you want me to write you a good novel, send me a good pen; not a gold one, but one which will not get stiff and rheumatic the moment I get attached to it. I never met with a good pen in my life."

To this last sentiment we think that a great multitude which no man can number will respond Amen. He says of them again:--

"Nobody ever suffered more from pens than I have, and I am glad that my labor with the abominable little tool is drawing to a close."

In private conversation he enlivened his more serious thoughts often with vivid surprises of expression; and he had a mild way of making a severe remark, which reminded Charlotte Cushman of a man she once saw making such a disturbance in the gallery of a theatre that the play could hardly proceed. Cries of "Throw him over!" arose from all parts of the house, and the noise became furious. All was tumultuous chaos until a sweet and gentle female voice was heard in the pit, when all grew silent to hear:--

"No, I pray you, my friends, don't throw him over. I beg that you will not throw him over, but--kill him where he is!"

It was only in the company of intimate personal friends, from whom all restraint was removed, that Hawthorne ever indulged in his natural buoyancy of spirits. Among them he occasionally condescended to uproarious fun. But he was like Dr. Johnson, who, when indulging in a scene of wild hilarity, suddenly exclaimed to his friends, as Beau Brummel approached, "Let us be grave; here comes a fool." If there was the slightest suspicion of there being a fool in the company Hawthorne always wore his armor. The pretentious and transcendental fools he hated worst of all; and the young man who had no taste for the finite, but thought the infinite was the thing for him, always left him with a feeling as of asphyxia.

Hawthorne's atmosphere was really unhealthy for transcendentalists. No doubt his dislike of Margaret Fuller arose from this feeling of his that she was always acting a part, always straining after an effect. He loved simple, natural, unaffected people, and the part of a sibyl was very distasteful to him. He suspected the inspiration of green tea in much that Margaret said, and very ungallantly pronounced her a humbug. But as he did this only upon the paper of his own private diary, with no thought of it ever being paraded before a critical and captious world, we should not blame him too severely. And if he was mistaken in what he wrote concerning her husband and her life in Rome, as seems to be the fact, no doubt he was deceived by gossip-loving friends in Rome concerning the matter. One does not write gratuitous falsehoods upon the pages of one's private notebook about acquaintances, as a general rule. If he had desired to injure Margaret he would have put his supposed facts in a different place, no doubt, and not merely written them in a moment of spleen where he never expected them to be seen.

The publication of such comment as this, and Carlyle's mention of Charles Lamb and others, seems to be due entirely to the total depravity of literary executors. As George Eliot says, it is like uncovering the dead Byron's club-foot, when he had been so sensitive about it through life, as his friend Trelawny boasts that he did. Margaret Fuller was a large-brained, big-hearted woman, but that she and Hawthorne could not thoroughly fraternize is not a strange thing. We see another instance of such lack of appreciation of each other's qualities in Henry James and the Bostonians of the present time. Even the admirers of the Boston type get a little quiet amusement from his delicious satire, although their admiration of the reformers may remain unshaken. That the world has got a little weary of the mutual admiration of the Boston coterie is an open secret. We have had a trifle too much of it from the day of Fields, who apparently invented Hawthorne, and would have put a patent upon him if possible, down to the present era of worship of that real hero, Emerson who, if he survives the laudations of his present army of admirers, may well hope for immortality.

The wife of Hawthorne was so different a person from the noble army of literary and artistic women who are so numerous to-day, but who in his time had just begun to assert themselves, that, believing her to be the perfect flower of womanhood, as he did, he could scarcely be expected to appreciate the Zenobias of that or of the present time.

Mrs. Hawthorne's sister, Elizabeth Peabody, was one of the women of the new era, and has spent her entire life in noble efforts to improve the world into which she was born; and who shall say whether Mrs. Hawthorne or Miss Peabody was the higher type of woman?

If we were obliged to compare Mrs. Hawthorne with the caricatures of the strong-minded woman in which novelists so delight,--those "housekeepers by the wrath of God,"--like Mrs. Jellaby and similar monstrosities, then the answer would not be hard. We could all cry, Mrs. Hawthorne, now and forever! But when we compare her to the strong-minded women like George Eliot, perfect wives, perfect home-makers, perfectly sympathetic and loyal comrades of their husbands, and lacking nothing of womanly softness or tenderness with all their strength, then the answer is not so simple. But doubtless the fact that God created both types may be accepted as evidence that He saw uses for both, and that even the women whom He made "fools to match the men" are not without their purpose in the economy of the universe.

Such thoughts as the following in regard to her husband, written by Mrs. Hawthorne after eight years of marriage, sound not unlike the rhapsodies of George Eliot concerning Mr. Lewes:--

"He has perfect dominion over himself in every respect, so that to do the highest, wisest, loveliest thing is not the least effort to him, any more than it is for a baby to be innocent. It is his spontaneous act, and a baby is not more unconscious of its innocence. I never knew such loftiness so simply borne. I have never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household matter any more than in the larger or more public ones. If the Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere their wings are very strong. Happy, happiest is the wife who can bear such and so sincere testimony to her husband after eight years' intimate union. Such a person can never lose the prestige which commands and fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness, but in a kind of blissful confusion live on. If I can only be so great, so high, so noble, so sweet as he, in any phase of my being, I shall be glad. I am not deluded nor mistaken, as the angels know now, and as all my friends will know in open vision."

We will quote but this one passage from her letters about him, though the Life is filled with similar ones, and will give but one of his love-letters to her, and that not entire. He says:--

"Sometimes during my solitary life in our old Salem house it seemed to me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive, for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm. But at length you were revealed to me in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own. I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm, and renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have a heart; you only have thrown a light deep downward and upward into my soul. You only have revealed me to myself, for without your aid my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own shadow--to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its fantasies for my own real actions. . . . If the whole world stood between us we must have met; if we had been born in different ages we could not have been sundered!"