Hawthorne

Ch. 7 - Last Years

Of the four last years of Hawthorne's life there is not much to tell

that I have not already told. He returned to America in the summer of

1860, and took up his abode in the house he had bought at Concord

before going to Europe, and of which his occupancy had as yet been

brief. He was to occupy it only four years. I have insisted upon the

fact of his being an intense American, and of his looking at all

things, during his residence in Europe, from the standpoint of that

little clod of western earth which he carried about with him as the

good Mohammedan carries the strip of carpet on which he kneels down to

face towards Mecca. But it does not appear, nevertheless, that he

found himself treading with any great exhilaration the larger section

of his native soil upon which, on his return, he disembarked. Indeed,

the closing part of his life was a period of dejection, the more acute

that it followed directly upon seven years of the happiest

opportunities he was to have known. And his European residence had

been brightest at the last; he had broken almost completely with those

habits of extreme seclusion into which he was to relapse on his return

to Concord. "You would be stricken dumb," he wrote from London,

shortly before leaving it for the last time, "to see how quietly I

accept a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my

engagements without a murmur.... The stir of this London life, somehow

or other," he adds in the same letter, "has done me a wonderful deal

of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for

if I had my choice I should leave undone almost all the things I do."

"When he found himself once more on the old ground," writes Mr.

Lathrop, "with the old struggle for subsistence staring him in the

face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of

depression would follow." There is indeed not a little sadness in the

thought of Hawthorne's literary gift, light, delicate, exquisite,

capricious, never too abundant, being charged with the heavy burden of

the maintenance of a family. We feel that it was not intended for such

grossness, and that in a world ideally constituted he would have

enjoyed a liberal pension, an assured subsistence, and have been able

to produce his charming prose only when the fancy took him.

The brightness of the outlook at home was not made greater by the

explosion of the Civil War in the spring of 1861. These months, and

the three years that followed them, were not a cheerful time for any

persons but army-contractors; but over Hawthorne the war-cloud appears

to have dropped a permanent shadow. The whole affair was a bitter

disappointment to him, and a fatal blow to that happy faith in the

uninterruptedness of American prosperity which I have spoken of as the

religion of the old-fashioned American in general, and the

old-fashioned Democrat in particular. It was not a propitious time for

cultivating the Muse; when history herself is so hard at work,

fiction has little left to say. To fiction, directly, Hawthorne did

not address himself; he composed first, chiefly during the year 1862,

the chapters of which our _Our Old Home_ was afterwards made up. I

have said that, though this work has less value than his purely

imaginative things, the writing is singularly good, and it is well to

remember, to its greater honour, that it was produced at a time when

it was painfully hard for a man of Hawthorne's cast of mind to fix his

attention. The air was full of battle-smoke, and the poet's vision was

not easily clear. Hawthorne was irritated, too, by the sense of being

to a certain extent, politically considered, in a false position. A

large section of the Democratic party was not in good odour at the

North; its loyalty was not perceived to be of that clear strain which

public opinion required. To this wing of the party Franklin Pierce

had, with reason or without, the credit of belonging; and our author

was conscious of some sharpness of responsibility in defending the

illustrious friend of whom he had already made himself the advocate.

He defended him manfully, without a grain of concession, and described

the ex-President to the public (and to himself), if not as he was,

then as he ought to be. _Our Old Home_ is dedicated to him, and about

this dedication there was some little difficulty. It was represented

to Hawthorne that as General Pierce was rather out of fashion, it

might injure the success, and, in plain terms, the sale of his book.

His answer (to his publisher), was much to the point.