Dark Tales (With Original Illustrations). Nathaniel Hawthorne

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ