Hawthorne

Ch. 6 - England and Italy

Hawthorne was close upon fifty years of age when he came to Europe--a

fact that should be remembered when those impressions which he

recorded in five substantial volumes (exclusive of the novel written

in Italy), occasionally affect us by the rigidity of their point of

view. His Note-Books, kept during his residence in England, his two

winters in Rome, his summer in Florence, were published after his

death; his impressions of England, sifted, revised, and addressed

directly to the public, he gave to the world shortly before this

event. The tone of his European Diaries is often so fresh and

unsophisticated that we find ourselves thinking of the writer as a

young man, and it is only a certain final sense of something

reflective and a trifle melancholy that reminds us that the simplicity

which is on the whole the leading characteristic of their pages, is,

though the simplicity of inexperience, not that of youth. When I say

inexperience, I mean that Hawthorne's experience had been narrow. His

fifty years had been spent, for much the larger part, in small

American towns--Salem, the Boston of forty years ago, Concord, Lenox,

West Newton--and he had led exclusively what one may call a

village-life. This is evident, not at all directly and superficially,

but by implication and between the lines, in his desultory history of

his foreign years. In other words, and to call things by their names,

he was exquisitely and consistently provincial. I suggest this fact

not in the least in condemnation, but, on the contrary, in support of

an appreciative view of him. I know nothing more remarkable, more

touching, than the sight of this odd, youthful--elderly mind,

contending so late in the day with new opportunities for learning old

things, and on the whole profiting by them so freely and gracefully.

The Note-Books are provincial, and so, in a greatly modified degree,

are the sketches of England, in _Our Old Home_; but the beauty and

delicacy of this latter work are so interwoven with the author's air

of being remotely outside of everything he describes, that they count

for more, seem more themselves, and finally give the whole thing the

appearance of a triumph, not of initiation, but of the provincial

point of view itself.

I shall not attempt to relate in detail the incidents of his residence

in England. He appears to have enjoyed it greatly, in spite of the

deficiency of charm in the place to which his duties chiefly confined

him. His confinement, however, was not unbroken, and his published

journals consist largely of minute accounts of little journeys and

wanderings, with his wife and his three children, through the rest of

the country; together with much mention of numerous visits to London,

a city for whose dusky immensity and multitudinous interest he

professed the highest relish. His Note-Books are of the same cast as

the two volumes of his American Diaries, of which, I have given some

account--chiefly occupied with external matters, with the accidents

of daily life, with observations made during the long walks (often

with his son), which formed his most valued pastime. His office,

moreover, though Liverpool was not a delectable home, furnished him

with entertainment as well as occupation, and it may almost be said

that during these years he saw more of his fellow-countrymen, in the

shape of odd wanderers, petitioners, and inquirers of every kind, than

he had ever done in his native land. The paper entitled "Consular

Experiences," in _Our Old Home_, is an admirable recital of these

observations, and a proof that the novelist might have found much

material in the opportunities of the consul. On his return to America,

in 1860, he drew from his journal a number of pages relating to his

observations in England, re-wrote them (with, I should suppose, a good

deal of care), and converted them into articles which he published in

a magazine. These chapters were afterwards collected, and _Our Old

Home_ (a rather infelicitous title), was issued in 1863. I prefer to

speak of the book now, however, rather than in touching upon the

closing years of his life, for it is a kind of deliberate _r**** of

his impressions of the land of his ancestors. "It is not a good or a

weighty book," he wrote to his publisher, who had sent him some

reviews of it, "nor does it deserve any great amount of praise or

censure. I don't care about seeing any more notices of it."

Hawthorne's appreciation of his own productions was always extremely

just; he had a sense of the relations of things, which some of his

admirers have not thought it well to cultivate; and he never

exaggerated his own importance as a writer. _Our Old Home_ is not a

weighty book; it is decidedly a light one. But when he says it is not

a good one, I hardly know what he means, and his modesty at this

point is in excess of his discretion. Whether good or not, _Our Old

Home_ is charming--it is most delectable reading. The execution is

singularly perfect and ripe; of all his productions it seems to be the

best written. The touch, as musicians say, is admirable; the

lightness, the fineness, the felicity of characterisation and

description, belong to a man who has the advantage of feeling

delicately. His judgment is by no means always sound; it often rests

on too narrow an observation. But his perception is of the keenest,

and though it is frequently partial, incomplete, it is excellent as

far as it goes. The book gave but limited satisfaction, I believe, in

England, and I am not sure that the failure to enjoy certain

manifestations of its sportive irony, has not chilled the appreciation

of its singular grace. That English readers, on the whole, should have

felt that Hawthorne did the national mind and manners but partial

justice, is, I think, conceivable; at the same time that it seems to

me remarkable that the tender side of the book, as I may call it,

should not have carried it off better. It abounds in passages more

delicately appreciative than can easily be found elsewhere, and it

contains more charming and affectionate things than, I should suppose,

had ever before been written about a country not the writer's own. To

say that it is an immeasurably more exquisite and sympathetic work

than any of the numerous persons who have related their misadventures

in the United States have seen fit to devote to that country, is to

say but little, and I imagine that Hawthorne had in mind the array of

English voyagers--Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil Hall, Miss

Martineau, Mr. Grattan--when he reflected that everything is relative

and that, as such books go, his own little volume observed the

amenities of criticism. He certainly had it in mind when he wrote the

phrase in his preface relating to the impression the book might make

in England. "Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for

courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute

in the least to any mutual advantage and comfort if we were to besmear

each other all over with butter and honey." I am far from intending to

intimate that the vulgar instinct of recrimination had anything to do

with the restrictive passages of _Our Old Home_; I mean simply that

the author had a prevision that his collection of sketches would in

some particulars fail to please his English friends. He professed,

after the event, to have discovered that the English are sensitive,

and as they say of the Americans, for whose advantage I believe the

term was invented; thin-skinned. "The English critics," he wrote to

his publisher, "seem to think me very bitter against their countrymen,

and it is perhaps natural that they should, because their self-conceit

can accept nothing short of indiscriminate adulation; but I really

think that Americans have much more cause than they to complain of me.

Looking over the volume I am rather surprised to find that whenever I

draw a comparison between the two people, I almost invariably cast the

balance against ourselves." And he writes at another time:--"I

received several private letters and printed notices of _Our Old Home_

from England. It is laughable to see the innocent wonder with which

they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice, insanity,

jealousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting the least suspicion

that there may be a particle of truth in them. The monstrosity of

their self-conceit is such that anything short of unlimited admiration

impresses them as malicious caricature. But they do me great injustice

in supposing that I hate them. I would as soon hate my own people."

The idea of his hating the English was of course too puerile for

discussion; and the book, as I have said, is full of a rich

appreciation of the finest characteristics of the country. But it has

a serious defect--a defect which impairs its value, though it helps to

give consistency to such an image of Hawthorne's personal nature as we

may by this time have been able to form. It is the work of an

outsider, of a stranger, of a man who remains to the end a mere

spectator (something less even than an observer), and always lacks the

final initiation into the manners and nature of a people of whom it

may most be said, among all the people of the earth, that to know them

is to make discoveries. Hawthorne freely confesses to this constant

exteriority, and appears to have been perfectly conscious of it. "I

remember," he writes in the sketch of "A London Suburb," in _Our Old

Home_, "I remember to this day the dreary feeling with which I sat by

our first English fireside and watched the chill and rainy twilight of

an autumn day darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding

occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his

lifetime), scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as if

indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there.

Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his

abode as much a stranger as I entered it." The same note is struck in

an entry in his journal, of the date of October 6th, 1854.