BOOKS.
Mn. JULIAN HAWTHORNE has given us here a very charming picture of the relations of his father and mother, and has con- trived to convince us how much of the tranquillity and inspira- tion of his literary life Hawthorne owed to his wife. Mrs. Haw- thorne clearly was a woman with a fine genius of insight ; but, none the less, we think it a pity that her letters should have been made so prominent as they have been in the biography. They are letters that make one respect and admire her ; but they area little too exalted in tone for publication, a little too gushing, and make us shrink sometimes as we read them. They were cer- tainly never written with the slightest notion that they would be published ; nor do we think that Mr. Julian Hawthorne has been well-advised in allowing his reverence and affec- tion for his mother to induce him to give her in this biography a place so prominent. Very likely she was the latent heat of Hawthorne's life; but then, when latent heat disappeara. as latent heat, and is transformed into an agency which is regis- tered by the thermometer, it alters its nature and character- istics, and is no longer the same. We have another complaint to make of the execution of this book. It is swollen-out with letters of little interest, —often very random letters,—from Haw- thorne's friends. The letters of Mr. Bridge, for example,and of Mr. Melville, and of one or two other correspondents, are not unfrequently harum-scarum letters, which tell us hardly any- thing of Hawthorne, except that his friends were not afraid to write rattling nonsense to him.
In some respects, even as regards Hawthorne himself, the Life- is a disappointing one, though that is probably no fault of the writer's. It gives us the impression of a man who hardly ever interested himself deeply in any subject except his own musings and imaginations. You find no evidence of deep literary delight in the works of others ; no evidence of strong political interests ; no evidence of strong philosophical or moral interests ; no evidence of external interests of any sort or kind. His wife says. of him in one place that "he was by nature profoundly social." If so, what he was by nature he certainly was not in fact. The impression which his stories produce upon us of profound solitariness is even deepened by this biography ; though it is clear enough that with his wife and children his mind was, after his marriage, engrossingly occupied. But he was brought up in habits of shyness and reserve which were apparently indigenous in almost all the Hawthornes, and which he never tried to shake off ; and no doubt it was to these habits that his literary genius owed its unique power. The first volume of the Life closes with a remark, written down in one of Hawthorne's journals, that "when we see how little we can express, it is a wonder that any one ever takes up a pen a second time ;" and that is a remark which tells the secret both of the fre- quent disappointment one feels in reading Hawthorne's Life, and of the delight one feels in reading his most powerful works. He was always feeling, apparently, how little he could express, how remote the world was from him, how little impulse he had to embody himself in the life of the world, and how dreamlike such attempts as he did actually make appeared to him to be. When only seventeen he wrote to his mother that he found no occupa- tion to his liking, and he wished he could live without a profes- sion. This was not laziness, but due to a certain curdling away of
* A-well known Irish grievance, that Dublin is paved with English paving-stone..
t Nathaniel Hawtherros and Tria Wife: a Biography. By JuliAn Hawthorne. 2 vols. London : Chaff° and Windus.
his mind from the practical pursuits of ordinary men. "When the heart is full of care, or the mind much occupied," he wrote in his note-book, "the summer, and the sunshine, and the moonlight are but a gleam and glimmer,—a vague dream which does not come within us, but only makes itself imperfectly perceptible on the outside of us ;" and this was the state of mind in which Hawthorne probably oftener found himself than any other man of genius of his time. No man with a mind of so little impulse, one so far away from actual life, could be a poet ; though Hawthorne had imaginativeness enough for almost any kind of poem, if he had only had impulse enough, ardour enough, "go" enough, to lose himself in the rhythm and the rhyme. But for this he stood aloof too much even from the plastic medians of his own art,— namely, words. "Words," he says, "so innocent and powerless are they as standing in a dictionary ; how potent for good and evil they become to one who knows how to combine them." But with all his imagination he never made words the potent implement which he was here contemplating, chiefly, we believe, because he was far too conscious of the distance between words and things, and because you must forget the distance between words and things, and use words almost as if they were living and breathing creatures, if you are to make them as potent, for either good or evil, as they may be made. Hawthorne's shyness, reserve, aloopess of mind, prevented him from entering ardently, on his own account, into the greater number of human interests, and yet gave him the special charm he had,—the charm of a man who hardly ever loses sight of the dreaminess of life and the strange- ness of the scene in which be is an actor. "This present life," he writes, "has hardly substance and tangibility enough to be the image of eternity. The future too soon becomes the pre- sent, which, before we can grasp it, looks back upon us as the past. It must, I think, be only the image of an image. Our next state of existence, we may hope, will be more real,—that is to say, it may be only one remove from a reality. But as yet we dwell in the shadow cast by time, which is itself the shadow cast by eternity." That passage adequately represents Hawthorne's habit of mind ; and one can hardly expect from a man with such a habit of mind any very strong grasp of life, nor do we find it. When we take up this Life of Hawthorne after such a book as Stanley's LVe of Arnold, we begin to wonder whether the two men are different individuals of the same species, or individuals of totally different species.
One of the most characteristic passages in these volumes is the study which Hawthorne made of a rabbit, the plaything of his children, during one of his wife's absences from home. There he shows his vigilant genius and sympathy a great deal more effectually than he does in writing to his sisters or his friends, or even to his wife. The rabbit was a mere living shadow to him ; and for that very reason it interested him, because he felt so much of the living shadow in himself. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the delicacy and humour of this sketch :—
"Lenox, July 28th, 1851.—At seven o'clock a.m. wife, Una, and
Rosebud took their departure, leaving Julian and me, and Mrs. Peters (the coloured lady who does our cooking for us), and Bunny, the rabbit, in possession of the Red Shanty. Bunny does not turn out to
be a very interesting companion, and makes me more trouble than he is worth. There ought to be two rabbits, in order to bring out each other's remarkable qualities, if any there be. Undoubtedly, they have the least feature and characteristic prominence of any creature that God has made. With no playfulness, as silent as a fish, in- active, Bunny's life passes between a torpid half-slumber and the nibbling of clover-tops, lettuce, plantain - leaves, pig-weed, and crumbs of bread. Sometimes, indeed, he is seized with a little im- pulse of friskiness; but it does not appear to be sportive, but nervous. Bunny has a singular countenance, like somebody's I have seen, but whose I forget. It is rather imposing and aristocratic, at a cursory glance ; but, examining it more closely, it is found to be laughably vague. I am strongly tempted of the Evil One to murder him privately ; and I wish with all my heart that Mrs. Peters would drown him After breakfast, we took Bunny out of doors, and put him down on the grass. Bunny appears to most advantage out of 'doors. His most interesting trait is the apprehensiveness of his nature; it is as quick and as continually in movement as an aspen- leaf. The least noise startles him, and you may see his emotion in the movement of his ears ; he starts, and scrambles into his little house, but in a moment peeps forth again and begins nibbling the grass and weeds,—again to be startled and as quickly reassured. Sometimes he sets out on a nimble little run, for no reason, but inst as a dry leaf is blown along by a puff of wind. I do not think that these fears are any considerable torment to Bunny ; it is his nature to live in the midst of them, and to intermingle them, as a sort of piquant sauce, with every morsel he eats. It is what redeems his life from dulness and stagnation."
What will, perhaps, interest the reader most in this Life, is the sketch it gives us of the habits of the family into which Hawthorne was born. Both his mother and the elder of his two sisters lived as lonely a life as it was possible for the members of a family to live. They eat their meals mostly in their own rooms ; and on one occasion Hawthorne mentions that he had hardly seen his sister for two months,—though living in the same house with her,—and on another occasion it appears that she had been secluded for a year or two from her own people. After their mother's death, Miss Hawthorne lived the life de- scribed in the following passage ; and yet her health seems always to have been good, and her spirits cheerful :—
" When Hawthorne went to Lenox, after Madame Hawthorne's death, the household in Mall Street was, of course, broken up ; and his two sisters, Elizabeth and Louisa, were established, the latter with her relatives in Salem, the former in lodgings in a farmer's family on the sea-coast not far from Salem, where she lived, in per- fect contentment, for more than thirty years, a life the solitude of which would have killed most women in as many days. Beyond the members of the farmer's family (who could be her associates only in the most literal sense) she very seldom saw or communicated with any one. She got up at noon every day, walked or read till two in the morning, and then all was darkness and silence till noon again. Her health was always perfect, both of mind and body ; and she not only kept abreast of all that was going on in the great world, but was to the end of her life a keen and sagacious critic of American and European public men and politics. I mention this because, from the purely intellectual point of view, she bore a very striking resemblance to her brother; and this resemblance will b..3 made to appear more fully in a subsequent portion of the present work."
No wonder that there is a certain want of human interest, a certain remoteness from life, in the story of the most distin- guished member of such a family as this. What surprises one, however, is the curious absence of anything like passionate in- terest in the literature of the world,—apart, we mean, from his own visionary creations,—to be noted in Hawthorne. There is nothing in his letters like the vigorous interest which Shelley, for instance, took in the Greeks and in the Grecian poetry ; nothing like Wordsworth's and Coleridge's eagerness to find out the essentials of poetry ; nothing like Lamb's delight in the old dramatists ; or Landor's in the old-world orators and states- men. Hawthorne's imagination mused on the world before his own eyes, not on the world of thought and feeling embodied in books. Perhaps it was the very unreality to him of that sensible world which made it so engrossing.
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