BOOKS.
ON laying down this interesting memoir,—and interesting as it is, it is difficult to express how much more artistic Mr. Julian Hawthorne might have made it by excluding letters of no manner of interest, and classifying more carefully the materials before him,—the impression which predominates over all others is not so much surprise at the retiring and reserved tempera- ment of the subject of the book, as surprise that we should find it so surprising. Part of our surprise at Hawthorne's " detach- ment " from the world is, no doubt, due to the fact of Haw- thorne's genius. It is much rarer for men of conscious power of any kind not to be eager to see their power reflected in the face of the world around them, than it is for men of no such power. But Hawthorne's consciously strong indisposition to throw himself into life, is not only specially rare in men of genius, it is comparatively rare in all the races of the Western World, and it is hard to imagine what the United States would be like if the mass of the people there had been disposed to take his very strong view of the general uselessness and frequent mischievousness of all kinds of action. Hawthorne was, in many respects, a man after the late Mr. Bagehot's own heart. That great thinker used always to be lamenting that the ages when practical energy was the only quality which could make any head against the innumerable physical dangers by which men were surrounded, had created and transmitted to our own times a type of character in which practical energy is far too potent for the reflective faculties by which it should be restrained, and to which it should be subordinated. He hoped to see a type of character gradually emerging very like Nathaniel Hawthorne's, a type of character of which the chief note should be a disposition to suspect active impulses, a disposition to think depreciatingly of eagerness, and to condemn severely anything like restless energy,—a disposition to ask on every occasion, as Lord Melbourne used to ask, "Can't you let it alone? "—a disposition to exhort men never to do to-day what they could safely put off till to-morrow. He held that the virtues of a stone age, when all life was almost intolerably hard, and the virtues of barbarism, when all life was intolerably militant, ought not to be regarded as virtues in our own century, when the chief ends of life can be quietly secured, and with com- paratively little conflict, when the chief danger is of men acting first, and thinking—which usually means repenting—afterwards. Hawthorne's was just such a temperament as Mr. Bagehot would have warmly approved, and would have wished to see becoming the temperament of the great mass of the Anglo-Saxon race. And yet, so far as we can judge, the great flaw in Nathaniel Hawthorne as a man, is to be traced to the predominance in him of this temperament ; while it is to the great credit of his countrymen that during his lifetime they were moved and guided by men of just the opposite type of character. In Haw- thorne's earlier life, he did all in his power to promote the success of the party which made concessions to Slavery. His intimate friend, President Pierce, was materially assisted, in his election for President, by the little Life of him which Hawthorne wrote. President Pierce and his friends favoured the Fugitive Slave Law which did so much to bring on the struggle between North and Smith, and to persuade the Southerners that the North
• Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: a Biography. By Jail= Hawthorne. 2 rob. London : Chatto and Windus.
close at hand, Hawthorne held, as his son tells us, that "to maintain that we were ready to imperil our life merely out of regard for the liberation of the negroes was, in his opinion, to utter sentimental nonsense." In fact, no Northern party did more to encourage the Slave States to their rebellion than the party of which Hawthorne was a sort of representative man, the party which saw so clearly the foibles of the philanthropists that they could not see the essential rectitude of their position, and which subordinated the moral question of right and wrong so com- pletely to the intellectual issue of how to maintain the Union, that the moral issue practically vanished altogether out of sight. Yet this very man had to admit, so soon as the war had broken out, that " if we are fighting for the annihilation of Slavery, to be sure it may be a wise object, and offer a tangible result, and the only one which is consistent with a future union between North and South" (Vol. II., p. 277). That is a states- manlike sentence; but clearly Hawthorne and General Pierce, and all who took the side of favouring concession after con- cession to the South in the ten years preceding 1861 were more or less responsible for the conflict when it came. It would have been wiser far to make the South feel a decade earlier that on this subject of the extension of Slavery the will of the North was iron in its determina- tion, than to flatter them by hopes which, when they came to the trial, were cruelly deceived. It is matter for thankful- ness, we think, that the predominant impulses of the Northern States were very much more active and aggressive against the moral evil with which they had to deal than they would have been if the Americans had been in temperament all Hawthorne& We feel little doubt that Hawthorne dimly felt, and more or less regretted, the weakness of his own Laodicean politics when he saw the end to which they led. No doubt be was quite right in his constancy to General Pierce, who only made the great mis- take of representing, as President, the lukewarm policy which Hawthorne himself approved ; but the letter which Hawthorne wrote to an English friend on the subject of the war, in the summer of 1861, shows vividly how anxious he was ultimately to kindle the zeal on which earlier he had thrown a wet blanket, and shows also how puzzled he was to define his new position, though he reproached his English friends for defending the very ground which he himself had hitherto occupied. It is a letter which first saw the light long ago; but it is so characteristic of Hawthorne, and especially of this great flaw in his character, that we do not hesitate to republish it once more :—
" My DEAR BENNOCH,— We also have gone to war, and we seem to have little, or at least a very misty idea of what we are fighting for. It depends upon the speaker ; and that, again, depends upon the section of the country in which his sympathies are enlisted. The Southern man will say, We fight for State rights, liberty, and independence.' The Middle Western man will avow that he fights for the Union ; while our Northern and Eastern man will swear that from the beginning his only idea was liberty to the blacks and the anni- hilation of slavery. All are thoroughly in earnest, and all pray for the blessing of Heaven to rest upon the enterprise. The appeals are so numerous, fervent, and yet SO contradictory, that the Great Arbiter to whom they so piously and solemnly appeal must be sorely puzzled how to decide. One thing is indisputable,—tbe spirit of our young men is thoroughly aroused. Their enthusiasm is boundless, and the smiles of our fragile and delicate women cheer them on. When I hear their drums beating, and see their colours flying, and witness their steady marching, I declare, were it not for certain silvery monitors banging by my temples, suggesting prudence, I feel as if I could catch the infection, shoulder a musket, and be off to the war myself ! Meditating on these matters, I begin to think our CRAM RS to war is a mistake. Why draw from our young men in the bloom and heyday of their youth the soldiers who are to fight our battles? Had I my way, no man should go to war under fifty years of age, such men having already had their natural share of worldly pleasures and life's enjoyments. And I don't see bow they could make a more creditable or more honourable exit from the world's stage than by becoming food for powder, and gloriously dying in defence of their home end country. Then I would add a premium in favour of recruits of threescore years and upward, as, virtually with one foot in the grave, they would not be likely to run away. I apprehend that no people ever built up the skeleton of a warlike history so rapidly as we are doing. What a fine theme for the poet ! if you were not a born Britisher, from whose country we expect no help and little sym- pathy, I would ask you for a martial strain,—a song to be sang by our camp-fires, to soothe the feelings and rouse the energies of our troops, inspiring them to meet like men the great conflict that awaits them, resolved to conquer or die—if dying, still to conquer. Ten thousand poetasters have tried, and tried in vain, to give us a rousing 'Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.' If we fight no better than we sing, may the Lord have mercy upon us and upon the nation !
NAT!!. HAWTHORNE."
It was rather hard to reproach the "born Britisher" with the would stick at no extension of the Slave Territory which the unsympathetic mind which had been in all essentials his own South should'resolutely demand. When the great issue was mind until the South fired upon the flag. Mr. Bennoch re- plied much as the Hawthorne of former years would have replied to Emerson on the Slavery question ; but both Haw- thorne and Mr. Bennoch grossly misrepresented England when they declared, as Mr. Julian Hawthorne, who ought to know better, also seems to imply, that from England there was little sympathy to be expected for the North in its struggle. Doubtless the aristocracy and middle-class gave the North nothing but bitter reproaches, bad advice, and worse prophecies. But the great majority of the English people not only felt keenly with the North, but far more keenly with it than Mr. Hawthorne and the Pierce party had been able to feel, up to the moment of the outbreak of hostilities.
The excuse for Hawthorne personally is that he was always more or less revolted by the philanthropic type of character. Philanthropists seemed to him,—which, indeed, they often are, —so much less than good men who are not philanthropists,— they seemed to lose themselves so completely in "causes," and to become mere agents, sometimes even not very scrupulous agents, for an abstract idea,—that he always leaned to the poli- tit:al views which were regarded as "moderate," strove to ignore abstract causes, and balanced as anxiously as he could all the practical considerations bearing on the subject in hand. This dread of the philanthropists as a class often made him very unjust to their principles. Indeed, he had a deep distrust of all principles which seemed to be imperious or exacting in their tendency to overturn the existing state of things. And in reading his life, one cannot help feeling a certain surprise, that in a country where his cool and critical attitude of mind is assuredly more or less indigenous, the men of action, the men of a creed, the men who were for embodying their abstract principles in life even at the cost of a revolution, carried the day against the men who, like him, were disposed to condemn all precipitancy, and let things slide. Hawthorne, no doubt, owed a good deal of his genius to his dislike of action ; but that dislike represented much that was common to him with his countrymen, who are nothing if not patient, nothing if not tolerant, nothing if not almost enamoured of political shortcomings and political abuses. In this, Hawthorne exactly resembled them. For instance, as Consul at Liverpool he saw very much of the horrible cruelty which went on in the Mercantile Marine of his native country. He wrote several excellent despatches about it, and was always on the verge of putting together his whole view of the subject in a pamphlet. He never did ; for as he said characteristically enough,—" I quitted the Consulate before finding time to effect my purpose, and all that phase of my life immediately assumed so dream- like a consistency that I despaired of making it seem solid or tangible to the public." That was Hawthorne all over ; and yet it was also so American, that one wonders to find how commanding an influence the great reformers have wielded over American politics in all critical matters. After all, probably the age is not yet come, if it ever does, when the genius of action will not assert itself over the best races of the world. Thought is so pallid without action that only in the light of action does thought become palpable at all. With Hawthorne it hardly ever did. One lays down the book with a sensation of wonder at Hawthorne's having ever got so far in the life of action as actually to marry, to bring up children, and to live the life of an American Consul in a great maritime sea- port. His life was moonlit rather than sunlit ; but then the- moonlight at its best was very bright moonlight, with a charm and mystery all its own.
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