An Evening With Mrs. Hawthorne

THE news of Mrs. Hawthorne’s death reminded me of a happy evening spent beneath the roof ot that most gracious and lovable woman, at a time when for me to visit Hawthorne’s house was to make a pilgrimage to a shrine. I will not dwell on the more private and personal interests of the occasion, but I remember that in approaching the house I thought of Keats’s fine description of his visit to the home of Burns, when he “felt as if he were going to a tournament.”

Beginning with some such emotion, I felt very rich that evening, when Mrs. Hawthorne put into my hand several volumes of those diaries which carry us so near the heart of this great writer. As I reverently opened one, it seemed a singular Sortes Virgilianœ that my eye should first fall upon this passage : “ I am more an Abolitionist in feeling than in principle.” It was in a description of some festival day in Maine, when Hawthorne’s keen eye had noted the neat looks and courteous demeanor of a party of colored people. It removed at once the slight barrier by which the suspicious conscience of a reformer had seemed to separate me from him. I had seen him but twice,—remotely, as a boy looks at a celebrated man, — but it had always been painful to me that he, alone among the prominent literary men of New England, should be persistently arrayed on what seemed to me the wrong side. From that moment I convinced myself that his heart was really on our side, and only the influence of his early friend Pierce had led him to different political conclusions.

Then, I remember, Mrs. Hawthorne asked her younger daughter to sing to us ; and she sang dreamy and thoughtful songs, such as “ Consider the Lilies,” and Tennyson’s “ Break, break, break,” and “ Too Late.” “ It is not singing, it is eloquence,” said afterwards the proud and loving mother, from whose own thrilling and sympathetic voice the eloquence seemed well inherited. Mrs. Hawthorne had always seemed to dwell in an ideal world, through her own poetic nature as well as through her husband’s. I watched her as she sat on her low chair by the fire, while the music lasted ; her hair was white, her cheeks pallid, and her eyes full of tender and tremulous light. To have been the object of Hawthorne’s love imparted an immortal charm and sacredness to a life, that, even without that added association, would have had an undying grace of its own. She having thus lived and loved, gelebt und geliebet, it seemed as if her existence never could become more spiritual or unworldly than it already was.

After her children had left us for the night, we sat and talked together ; or rather I questioned and she answered, telling me of her husband’s home-life and also of his intercourse with strangers ; saying, what touched but did not surprise me, that men who had committed great crimes or whose memories held tragic secrets would sometimes write to him, or even come great distances to see him, and unburden their souls. This was after the publication of the “ Scarlet Letter,” which made them regard him as the fatherconfessor for all hidden sins. And that which impressed me most, after all, was her description of the first reading of that masterpiece. For this I have not to rely on memory alone, because I wrote it down, just afterwards, in my chamber, — a room beneath Hawthorne’s study, in the tower which he had added to the house.

She said that it was not her busband’s custom to sit with her while he wrote, nor to tell her about any literary work till it was finished, but that then he was always impatient to read it to her. In writing the “ Wonder-Book,” to be sure, he liked to read his day’s work to the children in the evening, by way of test. She added that while thus occupied with that particular book, he was in high spirits ; and this, as I knew, meant a good deal, for his daughter had once told me that he was capable of being the very gayest person she ever saw, and that “there never was such a playmate in all the world.”

But during the whole winter when the “ Scarlet Letter ” was being written he seemed depressed and anxious. “ There was a knot in his forehead all the time,” Mrs. Hawthorne said, but she thought it was from some pecuniary anxiety, such as sometimes affected that small household. One evening he came to her and said that he had written something which he wished to read aloud ; it was worth very little, but as it was finished, he might as well read it. He read aloud all that evening ; but as the romance was left unfinished when they went to bed, not a word was then said about it on either side. He always disliked, she said, to have anything criticised until the whole had been heard. He read a second evening, and the concentrated excitement had grown so great that she could scarcely bear it. At last it grew unendurable ; and in the midst of the scene, near the end of the book, where Arthur Dimmesdale meets Hester and her child in the forest, Mrs. Hawthorne fell from her low stool upon the floor, pressed her hands upon her ears, and said she could hear no more.

Hawthorne put down the manuscript and looked at her in perfect amazement. “ Do you really feel it so much ? ” he said; “then there must be something in it.” He prevailed on her to rise and to hear the few remaining chapters of the romance.

To those who knew Mrs. Hawthorne’s impressible nature, this reminiscence of hers will have no tinge of exaggeration, but will appear very characteristic ; she had borne to the utmost the strain upon her emotions, before yielding. The next day, she said, the manuscript was delivered to Mr. Fields, and the next morning he appeared early at the door, and on being admitted, caught up her boy in his arms, saying, “ You splendid little fellow, do you know what a father you have ? ” Then he ran up stairs to Hawthorne’s study, telling her, as he went, that he (and I think Mr. Whipple) had sat up all night to read it, and had come to Salem as early as possible in the morning. She did not go up stairs, but soon her husband came down, with fire in his eyes, and walked about the room, a different man.

I have hesitated whether to print this brief narrative. Yet everything which illustrates the creation of a great literary work belongs to the world. How it would delight us all, if the Shakespeare societies were to bring to light a description like this of the very first reading of “ Macbeth ” or of “Hamlet”! To me it is somewhat the same thing to have got so near to the birth-hour of the “ Scarlet Letter.” So I felt, at least, that evening ; and she who had first heard those wondrous pages was there before me, still sitting on the same low chair whence she had slipped to the floor, with her hands over her ears, just as the magician had wrought his spell to its climax. Now his voice and hers, each so tender and deep and with the modulation of some rare instrument, have alike grown silent, only to blend elsewhere, let us hope, in some loftier symphony.

T. W. Higginson.