This narrative of his career, in one sense so simple, so uneventful, has brought chiefly to the front, as we have followed it, a phase under which Hawthorne appears the most like other men; with motives easily understood, wishing to take his full share in human existence and its responsibilities; devoted in his domestic relations. Moderately ambitious of worldly welfare, but in poverty uncomplaining, he is so coolly practical in his view that he scarcely alludes to the products of his genius except as they may bear upon his material progress. Even this much of the character is uncommon, because of its sterling tone, the large, sustained manliness, and the success with which in the main it keeps itself firmly balanced; but it is a character not difficult to grasp, and one that appeals to every observer. It leaves out a great deal, however. The artist is absent from it. Neither is that essential mystery of organization included which held these elements together, united them with something of import far different, and converted the whole nature into a most extraordinary one, lifting it to a plane high above that on which it might, at first, seem to rest.

We know, from brief allusions in his "Note-Books," that Hawthorne was perfectly well aware of his high quality as an artist. He speaks of having won fame in his dismal room in Herbert Street; and at Arezzo, in 1858, the well "opposite Petrarch's birth-house" which Boccaccio introduced into one of his stories, recalls to the American writer one of his own performances. "As I lingered round it I thought of my own town-pump in old Salem, and wondered whether my towns-people would ever point it out to strangers, and whether the stranger would gaze at it with any degree of such interest as I felt in Boccaccio's well. Oh, certainly not; but I made that humble town-pump the most celebrated structure in the good town. A thousand and a thousand people had pumped there, merely to water oxen or fill their tea-kettles; but when once I grasped the handle, a rill gushed forth that meandered as far as England, as far as India, besides tasting pleasantly in every town and village of our own country. I like to think of this, so long after I did it, and so far from home, and am not without hopes of some kindly local remembrance on this score."[10] Such indications of the artistic consciousness are the merest ripples on the surface; the deeper substance of it, with Hawthorne, always remained out of sight. Letters, which are assumed to reveal so much of those who indite them, are, when we come to the fact, very insufficient exponents of character; as, for instance, we may observe in the letters of Michael Angelo, whose mood and manner vary according to the person addressed. Correspondence, it is true, is appetizing to readers, and should be prized for the help it gives in defining an individual, but it does not always do full justice to the larger being included in the whole personality. Hawthorne's letters are more representative of those faculties by which he came into association with his fellows, than of those which tended to separate him from them by making him single and phenomenal, in his function as writer of romance. But in his actual presence there was a something which did most noticeably correspond to the hidden sources of his power, and visibly express them. There was the hale and vigorous port of a man well fitted by his physical constitution to meet the rudest emergency; but there was also a temperament of which the reserve, the delicacy, the tremulous sensitiveness were equal to those of the most finely organized woman. "He was tall and strongly built," wrote his friend Hillard, "with broad shoulders, deep chest, a massive head.... He looked like a man who might have held the stroke oar in a University boat.... But, on the other hand, no man had more of the feminine element than he. He was feminine in his quick perceptions, his fine insight, his sensibility to beauty.... No man comprehended woman better than he. And his face was as mobile and rapid in its changes of expression as that of a young girl.... His eyes would darken visibly under the touch of a passing emotion, like the waters of a fountain ruffled by the breeze of summer. So, too, he was the shyest of men."[11]

The same writer adds: "There was nothing morbid in his character or temperament. He was, indeed, much the reverse of morbid. No man of genius ever had less the infirmities of genius than he.... Hawthorne was physically one of the healthiest of men. His pulse always kept even music. He cared nothing for wine or tobacco, or strong coffee or strong tea. He was a sound sleeper and an early riser. He was never moody or fitful or irritable. He was never unduly depressed or unreasonably elated. His spirits were not brilliant, but they were uniform, and, as Mrs. Hawthorne says, 'The airy splendor of his wit and humor was the light of his own home.'"

Dr. Loring has supplied another sketch of his appearance in general intercourse, which does a great deal to fill out our conception:—

"He knew no such thing as fear; was scrupulously honest; was unwavering in his fidelity; conscientious in the discharge of his duty. There may have been men of more latent power, but I have known no man more impressive, none in whom the great reposing strength seemed clad in such a robe of sweetness as he wore. I saw him on the day General Pierce was elected to the presidency. It was a bright and delicious day in late autumn. He was standing under the little shaded and embowered piazza of 'The Wayside,' at Concord, in the full vigor of his manhood, radiant with joy at the good fortune of his friend, and with that sad, shy smile playing over his face, which was so touching and charming. I have seen him fishing from the rocks of the Essex County shore at Swampscott, enjoying the bliss of absolute repose and the sweet uncertainty which attends the angler's line. I have sat with him in the dimly lighted room on autumnal evenings, cheerful and vocal with the cricket's chirp, and have heard his wise and sensible talk, uttered in that soft, melodious tone which gave such a peculiar charm to his utterances,—a tone so shy that an intruder would hush it into silence in an instant. I have strolled with him in the darkness of a summer night through the lanes of Concord, assured by his voice, which came up from the grass-grown roadside in a sort of mysterious murmur, that he was my companion still. And everywhere and at all times, he bore about him a strong and commanding presence and impression of unpretending power. I can hardly tell how Hawthorne succeeded in entertaining his companions and securing their entire confidence, unless it was that he displayed great good sense and acuteness and good temper in his intercourse with them, and never misled them by false promises or low appeals. This, in addition to his subtile genius, everywhere recognized and never wholly concealed to even the most commonplace associates, made him a most fascinating friend, as he was really and truly a man of rare quality among ordinary men."[12]

The earlier portraits of Hawthorne show the gentleness and the feminine traits in his disposition much more distinctly than those that are best known to the world. There is one, now owned by his cousin, Mr. Richard C. Manning, of Salem, which was painted in 1840 by Charles Osgood, an artist of Salem, and induced this comment from his sister Louisa: "The color is a little too high, to be sure, but perhaps it is a modest blush at the compliments which are paid to your pen." Another, painted by a Mr. C. G. Thompson, at Boston, in 1850 (now owned by Mr. Julian Hawthorne), resembles this, and presents, one would say, the ideal Hawthorne of the "Twice-Told Tales" and "The House of the Seven Gables." The face is smooth shaven and the cheeks are somewhat slender, making all the lines and features contribute to an effect of greater length and of more oval contour than that given by the later representations. The color is delicate; the large eyes look forth with peculiarly fascinating power from beneath a forehead of exceptional height and harmonious prominence. The hair is long, and recedes slightly on both sides of the forehead; a single lock in the middle curving over and drooping forward. There is less firmness about the lips than was characteristic of them in his latter years; they close softly, yet even in their pictured repose they seem to be mobile and ready to quiver with response to some emotion still undefined but liable to make itself felt at any instant. In its surrounding of long hair, and of a collar rising above the jaws, with a large black tie wound about the throat in the manner of a stock but terminating in a large bow at the front, the beardless countenance is stamped with a sort of prevalent aspect of the period when it was painted, which gives it what we call the old-fashioned look. It is, none the less, a striking one; one that arrests the glance immediately, and holds it by a peculiar spell. There is no suggestion of a smile or of cheeriness about it; the eyes even look a little weary, as with too much meditation in the brain behind them; there is not a trace discernible of that sturdy, almost military, resoluteness so marked in the familiar crayon portrait by Rowse, executed after Hawthorne's return from Italy and England. Here the face is pensive, timid, fresh and impressionable as that of some studious undergraduate unusually receptive of ideas, sentiments, and observations: it is, indeed, quiet and thoughtful to the verge of sadness. Longfellow kept always in his study a black-and-white copy from this portrait, and in speaking of it and of the subject's extreme shyness, said that to converse with Hawthorne was like talking to a woman. The Thompson picture was reproduced in 1851, in a steel engraving of considerable merit, and Hawthorne, thanking Mr. Fields for some of the prints, wrote from Lenox: "The children recognized their venerable sire with great delight. My wife complains somewhat of a want of cheerfulness in the face; and, to say the truth, it does appear to be afflicted with a bedevilled melancholy; but it will do all the better for the author of 'The Scarlet Letter.' In the expression there is a singular resemblance (which I do not remember in Thompson's picture) to a miniature of my father."

In Rome, Miss Landor modelled a bust, the marble copy of which is now in the Concord Public Library. It is of life-size, and presents the head in a position which raises the chin and inclines the plane of the face slightly backward, so that the effigy might be taken for that of an orator addressing a great audience. This pose was selected by the sculptress because, after due study, she was persuaded that when Hawthorne became interested in conversation and kindled with the desire to set forth his own view, he always raised his head and spoke from a commanding attitude. She chose to perpetuate a momentary action, instead of rendering his customary aspect of holding the chin somewhat down or on a firm level; and this may account for the likeness not being satisfactory to the members of Hawthorne's own family. The bust, however, renders impressively the magnificent proportions of the neck and head and the whole physiognomy. The mouth is not concealed, and, although it exhibits more decision than that of the Thompson picture, it conveys the same general impression of a quickly responsive sensibility. Mr. Thompson made his painting when Hawthorne was forty-six, and Miss Landor had sittings from the author at the age of fifty-four; but the difference in apparent maturity of power in the face would indicate a much longer interval. This is perhaps due to the difference in the means of representation, and to some defect of strength in Mr. Thompson's drawing; but perhaps also the decided change in Hawthorne's general look, which began under the greatly altered conditions attending his European life, proceeded very rapidly. He allowed a thick mustache to grow, during his last stay in England, and it was then that Kuntze modelled his profile, which sets Hawthorne's features before us in a totally different way from any of the other portraits. Unfortunately, Kuntze's relief is reduced to a size below that of life, and the features accordingly assume a cramped relation. The lofty forehead is given its due importance, however, and concentration of impassioned energy is conveyed by the outline of the face, from this point of view. The chin, always forcible as well as delicate, impresses one in this case with a sense of persistent and enduring determination on the part of the original; and with this sense there is mingled an impression of something that approaches sternness, caused, it may be, by the hirsute upper lip. In considering these several representations and the crayon by Rowse, together with the photographs taken after Hawthorne's home-return, it is impossible not to observe that the sturdier and more practical elements in the romancer gained upon him, so far as personal appearance was concerned, with advancing age and a wider experience of life in the large world. But such a series of glimpses can do no more than to suggest disjointedly the union in him of attributes positive and passive, which always struck those who met him. A photograph which was secured before he left England depicts him in a mood and with an air that very happily convey this complete equipment of the man, this wellnigh perfect combination of traits, which enabled him by sympathy to run through the entire gamut of human feeling. His friend, John Lothrop Motley, induced him one day to enter a photographer's establishment, on the plea that he had business of his own there. Hawthorne was given a book to read, while waiting; and when the photographer was ready Motley attracted his friend's attention. Hawthorne looked up with a dawning smile, a bright, expectant glance,—holding the book on his knee meanwhile, with a finger in the place,—and instantly a perfect negative was made. The resulting portraiture showed him absolutely as he was: a breathing form of human nobility; a strong, masculine, self-contained nature, stored in a stalwart frame—the face grown somewhat more rotund than formerly, through material and professional success, and lighted up with captivating but calm geniality; while over the whole presence reigned an exquisite temperance of reserve, that held every faculty in readiness to receive and record each finest fluctuation of joy or sorrow, of earnest or of sport.

Such as he there appears, we shall do well to imagine him to ourselves.

The tendency at first, among those who judged him from his writings alone, was to set him down as a misanthrope. We need not go to the other extreme now. That he inclined to gravity, in his manner and in his habit of thought, seems to be beyond question; but he was not sombre. Neither was he hilarious. At home, though he was frequently silent, he never appeared to be so from depression, except in seasons of distress at the illness of members of the household; the prevailing effect of his presence, even when he was least communicative, being that of a cheerful calm with mellow humor underlying it. One of his children said to Mr. T. W. Higginson: "There was never such a playmate in all the world." On the other hand, I remember a letter from Hawthorne (no longer accessible for exact quotation), in which he frankly speaks of himself as taking constitutionally a somewhat despondent view of things. But if he did so, he never permitted the shadow to fall upon his friends. "I should fancy from your books," Hillard confessed in a letter to him, "that you were burdened with some secret sorrow, that you had some blue chamber in your soul, into which you hardly dared to enter yourself; but when I see you, you give me the impression of a man as healthy as Adam in Paradise." Mr. Hillard once told the present writer that he had sometimes walked twenty miles along the highway with Hawthorne, not a word being spoken during the entire tramp, and had nevertheless felt as if he were in constant communication with his friend. Mr. Curtis wrote many years ago: "His own sympathy was so broad and sure, that, although nothing had been said for hours, his companion knew that not a thing had escaped his eye, nor a single pulse of beauty in the day or scene or society failed to thrill his heart. In this way his silence was most social. Everything seemed to have been said."

His fondness for seclusion, his steady refusal to talk when he did not feel like talking, and his unobtrusive but immovable independence in opinion, together with his complete disregard of conventional requirements in social intercourse, prevented Hawthorne from ever becoming a popular man. But he was the object of a loving admiration and the sincerest friendship, on the part of certain few intimates. Those who knew him best, and had been longest in relations with him, insensibly—as one observer has well suggested—caught from his fine reticence a kindred reluctance to speak about him to others. A degree of reverence was blended with their friendship, which acquired for them a sacred privacy. Having sound health physically, as well as a healthy mind, he enjoyed out-door occupations such as garden-work, rowing, fishing, and walking; but he never rode on horseback. He liked to make pedestrian trips through the country, stopping at haphazard in country taverns and farm-houses and listening to the conversation that went on there. In chance companionship of that sort, he could tolerate much freedom of speech, in consideration of the mother-wit that prompted it; but among men of his own class he never encouraged broad allusions. If anything that savored of the forbidden were introduced, he would not protest, but he at once turned the conversation towards some worthier subject. The practical vein in Hawthorne—his ingrained sympathy with the work-a-day world in which his father and his forefathers had busied themselves-adapted him to the official drudgery to which he devoted nine years of his life; although, while he was occupied with that, the ideal activities of his nature lay dormant. The two sets of faculties never could be exercised in equal measure at the same time: one or the other had to predominate. Yet in the conduct of his own affairs, so far as his pecuniary obligations were concerned, he was very prudent, and to the last degree scrupulous. One or two exceedingly small debts, which he was forced to contract, weighed upon him with a heaviness that to the ordinary commercial mind would be altogether inconceivable; and the relief he experienced when he was able to cancel them was inexpressible. His fault, in business, was that he attributed to other people a sense of honor equal to his own. This entailed upon him sundry losses which he was not well able to afford, through loans made to supposed friends. Notwithstanding the carefulness of his expenditure and a few moderately good receipts from the publication of his books in England, he died leaving a property of little more than twenty thousand dollars, besides his house at Concord and the copyright of his works.

In addition to the strong physical frame and tall stature several times noticed in the present sketch, Hawthorne's personal appearance was distinguished by his large and lustrous gray-blue eyes, luxuriant dark brown hair of remarkable fineness, and a delicacy of the skin that gave unusual softness to his complexion; a complexion subdued, but full of "healthy, living color," as Mrs. Hawthorne once described it. "After his Italian journey he altered much, his hair having begun to whiten, and a thick dark mustache being permitted to grow, so that a wit described him as looking like a 'boned pirate.' When it became imperative to shake off his reticence, he seems to have had the power of impressing as much by speech as he had before done by silence. It was the same abundant, ardent, but self-contained and perfectly balanced nature that informed either phase. How commanding was this nature may be judged by the fact related of him by an acquaintance, that rude people jostling him in a crowd would give way at once 'at the sound of his low almost irresolute voice.'... Something even of the eloquent gift of old Colonel Hathorne seemed to be locked within him, like a precious heirloom rarely shown; for in England, where his position called for speech-making, he acquitted himself with brilliant honor. But the effort which this compelled was no doubt commensurate with the success. He never shrank, notwithstanding, from effort, when obligation to others put in a plea. A member of his family has told me that, when talking to any one not congenial to him, the effect of the contact was so strong as to cause an almost physical contraction of his whole stalwart frame, though so slight as to be perceptible only to eyes that knew his informal and habitual aspects; yet he would have sunk through the floor rather than betray his sensations to the person causing them. Mr. Curtis, too, records the amusement with which he watched Hawthorne paddling on the Concord River, with a friend whose want of skill caused the boat continually to veer the wrong way, and the silent generosity with which he put forth his whole strength to neutralize the error, rather than mortify his companion by explanation. His considerateness was always delicate and alert."[13] A niece of Horace Mann, who passed a part of the spring of 1852 with Mr. and Mrs. Hawthorne at West Newton, supplies one little instance of this, which shall be registered here. Mrs. Dean, the lady in question, was then under engagement to teach in Boston, but had an interval of time on her hands before the work should begin. She was invited by the Hawthornes to the West Newton house (at that time owned by Mr. Mann), where she was to occupy a room which had formerly been hers. She found that a fire was carefully laid in the stove every night, to warm the room in the morning, and, thinking that too much trouble was taken on her account, she begged to be allowed to attend to this detail herself. It was then she discovered that it was Hawthorne who made up the fire; and he insisted upon continuing his service. Mrs. Dean also recalls that he listened attentively to the incidental and ordinary chat between Mrs. Hawthorne and herself, seldom making any remark, but, when he did volunteer one, giving it a pungent and epigrammatic or humorous turn. Entering the room where she was constructing a raised map for schoolroom use, he watched her with close interest for a while, and then observed: "I would rather have had the making of the world itself, in the beginning."

Taking whatever happened in a spirit always very much the same; reflective, penetrating, quietly sportive—a spirit, likewise, of patience and impartiality—Hawthorne kept his power of appreciation fresh to the very last. He could endure the humdrum tasks of government office, but they did not dull his pleasure in the simplest incidents of home-life, nor his delight in nature. "Every year the recurrent changes of season filled him with untold pleasure; and in the spring, Mrs. Hawthorne has been heard to say, he would walk with her in continuous silence, his heart full of the awe and delight with which the miracle of buds and new verdure inspired him." Taking everything in this spirit, we may repeat, mingling with the rough and the refined, and capable of extracting the utmost intellectual stimulus from the least of mundane phenomena, he maintained intact a true sense of relativity and a knowledge that the attainable best is, in the final analysis, incomplete. Contemplating a rose one day, he said: "On earth, only a flower is perfect." He cherished a deep, strong, and simple religious faith, but never approved of intellectual discussion concerning religion.

The slightness of the definite fact, or of the reminiscence vouchsafed by those who knew him, is continually impressed upon us in reviewing this career. Considered in its main outline, how very plain and unambitious is the history! A sea-captain's son, born in Salem; living obscurely; sent up to the rude clearing where a new village was founding in Maine; induced, against his preference, to go to college; writing timid stories and essays, which the world had no suspicion that it needed, and prompted to this by an impulse of which the origin is inexplicable; next, the author coming into notice, but under eclipse now and then from disappearance behind a public office; finally, the acknowledged romancer of indefinitely great endowment—the head of his order in America—sent abroad to an important post, where he is recognized and warmly greeted by every one who can discern clearly: such is the general course of the narrative. Afterwards, the now eminent man comes back to his native land, labors a little longer in comparative obscurity, suffers unmerited obloquy for his fidelity to a personal friend, while perfectly loyal to his government; then dies, and is mourned not alone by those devoted companions who felt him to be the one great fact to them in present human nature, but also by famous scholars and poets, and by a multitude of strangers, who gather around his bier with a stricken sense of loss ineffable. It is very simple; it is very democratic—the unnoticed American boy in humble circumstances becoming the centre of a circle of fame which is still extending its radius. Very simple it is, and yet inexplicable. But if we cannot tell precisely how the mind came into being, nor what were the fostering influences that most cogently aided its growth, we can, at least, pay our reverence to the overruling Power that brings genius to the flowering-point under circumstances seemingly the most unpropitious.

In 1863—the last year of his life—Hawthorne wrote to Mr. Stoddard, who had sent him a copy of his poem, "The King's Bell." "I sincerely thank you," he said, "for your beautiful poem, which I have read with a great deal of pleasure. It is such as the public had a right to expect from what you gave us in years gone by; only I wish the idea had not been so sad. I think Felix might have rung the bell once in his lifetime, and again at the moment of death. Yet you may be right. I have been a happy man, and yet I do not remember any one moment of such happy conspiring circumstances that I could have rung a joy-bell for it."

Yes, he had been a happy man; one who had every qualification for a rich and satisfactory life, and was able to make such a life out of whatever material offered. He might not have been willing to sound the joy-bell for himself, but the world has rung it because of his birth. As for his death, it is better not to close our sketch with any glimpse of that, because, in virtue of his spirit's survival among those who read and think, he still lives.

G. P. L.

New York, May 20, 1883.