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HAWTHORNE'S WORKS
WITH INTRODUCTIONS BY
KATHERINE LEE BATES
Professor of English Literature in-Wellesley College
2.1 2. 33
ffiur CSHfc
THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
PUBLISHERS : : : NEW YORK
50
OUR OLD HOME
A SERIES OF ENGLISH SKETCHES
COPYRIGHT, 1906,
BY THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO.
To
FRANKLIN PIERCE,
AS A SLIGHT MEMORIAL OF A COLLEGE FRIENDSHIP, PROLONGED
THROUGH MANHOOD, AND RETAINING ALL ITS VITALITY
IN OUR AUTUMNAL YEARS,
Uolutne is
BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.
A
CONTENTS.
PAGE
CONSULAR EXPERIENCES i
LEAMINGTON SPA . ........ 34
ABOUT WARWICK 57
RECOLLECTIONS OF A GIFTED WOMAN .... 80
LlCHFIELD AND UTTOXETER Io8
PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON 126
NEAR OXFORD 152
SOME OF THE HAUNTS OF BURNS 176-
A LONDON SUBURB 195
UP THE THAMES 223
OUTSIDE GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH POVERTY .... 254
Civic BANQUETS . 284
INTRODUCTION.
" A MORE charming, more unpleasant book has never
been written concerning England than this." So opens
the review of Our Old Home in the London Atfienceum
(October 3, 1863). The reviewer admits the keen ob-
servation, the delicate and whimsical fancy, the preci-
sion of touch that characterize these sketches, but resents
their " surprising bad temper," the author's "morbid
and perverse irritability." The North American Review,
on the other hand, blandly states (October, 1863) : " The
two properties of the work which seem to us the most
striking are its humor and its kindliness." These two
reviews are fairly typical of the English versus the
American reception of the book.
The displeasure aroused by Our Old Home in Eng-
land was not due to the recorded impressions as a whole,
but might, it would seem, have been averted by crossing
out merely a few passages from the manuscript. Dur-
ing the five years (July, i853-June, 1858) of Hawthorne's
tenure of the Liverpool consulship, an uncongenial, irk-
some, exasperating office, he had whispered to his
Note-Books certain things which, when shouted upon
the house-tops, set the chimney-pots vibrating with a
clatter that took him almost ludicrously by surprise.
His chief offence centred in his frankly unchivalrous
description of the elephantine dowager at Leamington
Spa, laying him open to charges of " ineffable coarse-
ness" and of taking "a cannibal view" of that revered
personage, the British matron. The Westminster Re-
view, indeed (January, 1864), was moved to deprecate
the general outcry, claiming that the American author's
" criticisms on English women have exposed him to
unfair, if not malicious retorts," and finding it " a little
vii
viii INTRODUCTION.
laughable that this single point in Mr. Hawthorne's book
should have had such prominence given to it."
An imperfect and unfriendly conception of the Eng-
lish character is the second count in the indictment.
The Quarterly Review (January, 1864) claimed that
Hawthorne "only believes in one John Bull " and denies
genius to any but "sickly or deformed" Englishmen,
seeing in Nelson no kinship to the race and ignoring
such exquisite spirits as Sidney, Herbert, Spenser. " He
acknowledges only one type, and that, to him, a repul-
sive one."
Toward the country itself, climate, landscape, archi-
tecture, it was admitted that he took a more gracious
attitude. " On the whole, we have no doubt," concludes
the Quarterly Review, "that Mr. Hawthorne found
England much too good for the English." The Specta-
tor (October 3, 1863) gave magnanimous praise to his
" half -dreamy and half-vigilant comments " and even pro-
fessed to enjoy their "flavor of intellectual malice."
But to England at large, conscious that it had been
prompt to recognize the genius of the hidden Salem
romancer and had lavished courtesies and hospitalities
upon the taciturn consul, these pungent comments sa-
vored of ingratitude. " These volumes," said the British
Quarterly (January, 1864), "contain passages which, in
literary skill and power, are worthy of the reputation of
the writer ; but they are disfigured by such outbursts of
Yankee spleen and coarseness that the author is no
longer the Nathaniel Hawthorne we once knew. From
his hands, at least, the ' Old Home ' has deserved another
kind of treatment."
Ten of the twelve sketches had already been printed
in the fall before the publication of the book. Consular
Experiences was new to the public, and LicJifield and
Uttoxeter had appeared (Harper's Magazine, April,
1857) only in part, but the others had been made known
to readers of the Atlantic in the following sequence :
Some of the Haunts of Burns, by a Tourist without
Imagination or Enthusiasm, October, 1860; Near Oxford,
October, 1861 ; Pilgrimage to Old Boston, January, 1862 ;
INTRODUCTION. ix
Leamington Spa, October, 1862 ; About Warwick, De-
cember, 1862; Recollections of a Gifted Woman, January,
1863 ; A London Suburb, March, 1863 ; Up the Thames,
May, 1863 ; Outside Glimpses of English Poverty, July,
1863; Civic Banquets, August, 1863. The arrangement
of these dozen, sketches in Our Old Home presents, at
the outset, the official life at Liverpool ; then the first
retreat, often again sought out, at Leamington Spa,
neighbored by Warwick ; special pilgrimages to the
shrines of Shakespeare and Johnson, to Old Boston, Ox-
ford, and the haunts of Burns ; and, finally, four chap-
ters of London atmosphere, Greenwich Fair, the
Thames, English slums, and the Lord Mayor's feast, a
sketch whose dramatic close leaves the consul in des-
perate, heroic attitude, upon his legs, about to open
mouth, in the hush that follows the thunder, for an
after-dinner speech.
In mid-autumn of 1863, Our Old Home : A Series of
English Sketches was issued in one volume by Ticknor
and Fields of Boston, with a dedication to Franklin
Pierce, and simultaneously, in two volumes, by the Lon-
don house of Smith and Elder. In those tense war-
times, the name of Pierce, here at the North, was hardly
one to conjure with, and Hawthorne's friends feared
that the proposed dedication might work against the
fortunes of his book. But in a sense which the author
was swift to recognize, this book, the fruit of his English
residence, belonged to the ex-President. In the cam-
paign of ten years before, when General Pierce was the
Democratic candidate, Hawthorne, for the sake of a
friendship dating from their college life at Bowdoin, had
written for him a campaign biography, a service
which was promptly rewarded by appointment to the
Liverpool consulate, then one of the richest offices in
the presidential gift. So to all remonstrance concern-
ing the inscription of Our Old Home, the writer, in a
letter to his publisher, steadfastly replied:
" I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me
to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter.
My long and personal relations with Pierce render the
x INTRODUCTION.
dedication altogether proper, especially as regards this
book, which would have had no existence without his
kindness ; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his
name is enough to sink the volume, there is so much the
more need that an old friend should stand by him. I
cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary
reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt
and thought it right to do ; and if I were to tear out the
dedication, I should never look at the volume again
without remorse and shame."
The war-cloud, glooming the country to which Haw-
thorne had just returned after seven years of absence,
rested heavily on his sensitive spirit, and during the
period in which he was selecting from his English jour-
nals and re-writing the material for these sketches, he
could summon no enthusiasm for his task. He con-
fessed to " a singular despondency and heaviness of
heart " as he worked, and had slight faith in the value of
his performance. " Heaven sees fit to visit me," he wrote
to Fields, " with an unshakable conviction that all this
series of articles is good for nothing." The asperity of
the English reviews, though he would admit no justice
in their specific charges, increased his distaste for the
book. On October eighteenth he wrote again : " The
English critics 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 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. It is not a good nor a weighty book, nor
does it deserve any great amount either of praise or
censure. I don't care about seeing any more notices
of it."
Later critics have put a higher estimate than the
author's on Our Old Home. Notably Mr. Henry James,
so acute a judge of the literary art, so cosmopolitan in
culture, finds the book charming in its very lightness,
INTRODUCTION. xi
singularly graceful, delicate, felicitous, and counts it the
best written of all Hawthorne's works. Hawthorne's
latest biographer, however, Professor Wooclberry, dis-
cerns in these sketches a characteristic detachment and
lack of sympathy, a chill of mood, a rigor of attitude,
rather disastrously combined with the caustic candor of
New England. As was to have been expected, Our Old
Home has long enjoyed in the mother country the bat-
tered honors of a guide-book and may be picked up for
a shilling, a dumpy volume in yellow paper covers, on
the humblest bookstalls of Warwick, Lichfield, and Old
Boston.
Passages from the English Note -Books, edited by Mrs.
Hawthorne and published in 1870, six years after the
writer's death, acquaints us with the quarry from which
these sketches were hewn. The tone of the Note-Books
is distinctly more genial than that of Our Old Home,
giving weight to Hawthorne's own opinion that the de-
pression of his mood, on his return to America, had
crept into these revisions of chapters from his old jour-
nals. His choice of material, too, was not always of
the best. There is nothing in the Consular Experiences
so memorable as the burial of Captain Auld, and the
Blenheim of Our Old Home is no satisfactory substitute
for the Oxford of the Note-Books. Out of the fifty-
pages of day-by-day description might have grown, it
would seem, an especially beautiful and vivid sketch of
the Lake Country, with swift pictures of water " like a
strip and gleam of sky," and of mountains shutting in
the poet's homes "like a neighborhood of kindly giants."
Hawthorne's account of the Lakes is brightened, too,
by some of his most characteristic human touches, as of
the look of the waiter disappointed in his fee, " not dis-
respectful in the slightest degree, but a look of profound
surprise, a gaze at the offered coin (which he neverthe-
less pockets) as if he either did not see it, or did not
know it, or could not believe his eyesight ; all this,
however, with the most quiet forbearance, a Christian-
like non-recognition of an unmerited wrong and insult."
Hawthorne's full sympathy with the poetic associations
xii INTRODUCTION.
of the Lake Country would have made pleasant reading
for the English, no less than his delight in the noble
scenery, a delight which, indeed, went to such lengths
that, by comparison with the Cumberland peaks, " a
group of huge lions lying down with their backs toward
each other," our New England hills impressed him as
no more picturesque than " apple-dumplings in a dish."
His reason for not including the Lake Country in his
series of sketches may be inferred from a jotting made
near the end of the trip :
" But, to say the truth, I was weary of fine scenery,
and it seemed to me that I had eaten a score of moun-
tains, and quaffed many lakes, all in the space of two or
three days, and the natural consequence was a surfeit.
There was scarcely a single place in all our tour where I
should not have been glad to spend a month ; but, by flit-
ting so quickly from one point to another, I lost all the
more recondite beauties, and had come away without re-
taining even the surface of much that I had seen. I am
slow to feel, slow, I suppose, to comprehend, and, like
the anaconda, I need to lubricate any object a great deal
before I can swallow it and actually make it my own.
Yet I shall always enjoy having made this journey, and
shall wonder the more at England, which comprehends
so much, such a rich variety, within its narrow bounds.
If England were all the world, it still would have been
worth while for the Creator to have made it, and man-
kind would have had no cause to find fault with their
abode ; except that there is not room enough for so many
as might be happy here."
The anaconda comparison goes far toward accounting
for those occasional outbursts of fatigue and impatience
in Hawthorne's treatment of foreign scenes. That
lonely, brooding imagination of his, for which the mer-
est fragment of life and time, a butterfly, a birthmark,
a single statue, a shred of old embroidery, was nutriment
enough, felt itself choked by mass. The British Mu-
seum was his despair. " It quite crushes a person to see
so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with
a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me !)
INTRODUCTION. xiii
that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon
were all burnt into lime, and that the granite Egyptian
statues were hewn and squared into building-stones,
and that the mummies had all turned to dust two thou-
sand years ago."
The charm of the Note-Books, so far as it depends
upon the freshness of the impressions, the frank infor-
mality of the tone, is necessarily lost to a certain degree
in the developed sketches, and yet these have not en-
tirely freed themselves from the monotony and triviality
incident to journals. Those inconsistencies, too, which
but attest the honesty of the Note-Books, are less natural
in Our Old Home. That Hawthorne should find Ox-
ford, on his first visit, " an ugly old town, of crooked and
irregular streets," and behold it, less than three months
later, '" exceedingly picturesque and rich in beauty and
grandeur and in antique stateliness " has a significance
one would not lose, but it is more curious that he should
have let stand, in the final collection, passages of such
contradictory mood as those in which he benignantly
comments on the autograph-scribbled walls in the birth-
place of Burns as due to a general human impulse, and
is irritated by a similar scrawling of signatures over
walls and windows and ceiling in the birthplace of
Shakespeare : " Methinks it is strange that people do
not strive to forget their forlorn little identities, in such
situations, instead of thrusting them forward into the
dazzle of a great renown, where, if noticed, they cannot
but be deemed impertinent."
It would seem, in short, that the English Note-Books
furnish foundations for better building than that of these
twelve somewhat listless and perfunctory sketches. Yet,
after all abatements, Our Old Home has fine and abid-
ing values.
Hawthorne grew to love the air and soil of his ances-
tral land so well, England's " veiled sky, and green
lustre of the lawn and fields," that he became sensible
of " an austere friendliness, shy, but sometimes almost
tender," in the very weather. The rooks " cawing and
chattering so high in the tree-tops that their voices get
xiv INTRODUCTION.
musical before reaching the earth," the foot-paths " wan-
dering away from stile to stile," hawthorn hedges, ivied
walls, hamlets of thatched cottages, lordly parks and
dreamy gardens, all were dear to him, and dear, even
from the first, with some strange spell as of long famil-
iarity. The Gothic cathedrals, too, uninstructed though
he was, this provincial New Englander, even in the
elements of architectural criticism, " conscious that a
flood of uncomprehended beauty," was pouring down
upon him, had their great message for sense and soul.
Those august temples stood apart in his mind, endowed
with "a vast, quiet, long-enduring life" of their own,
but state buildings and domestic were replete for him
with human associations. The Tower, the red-tiled
houses of Old Boston, " the gray magnificence of War-
wick Castle " were haunted with dim ghosts ; even
through the rusty open-work of some iron gate keeping
guard on perennial school grounds would gleam " the
shy, curious eyes of the little boys of past generations,
peeping forth from their infantile antiquity into the
strangeness of our present life." His master-stroke of
this sort is his description of Leicester's Hospital.
About ancient edifice and modern plays his whimsical
fancy, likening the Crystal Palace, "glimmering afar in
the afternoon sunshine," to a soap-bubble, and ventur-
ing on a yet more undignified simile for the statues that
adorn the west fagade of Lichfield cathedral. " Being
much corroded by the moist English atmosphere, during
four or five hundred winters that they had stood there,
these benign and majestic figures perversely put me in
mind of the appearance of a sugar image, after a child
has been holding it in his mouth. The venerable infant
Time has evidently found them sweet morsels." The
Thames Tunnel set in motion a long train of humorous
fantasies.
Hawthorne himself appears in these sketches not as
a misanthrope nor even as an abstracted recluse, but as
an active man of affairs, sustaining his due part in social
intercourse and supremely delighting in London, a
man generous to human need and tender of human
INTRODUCTION. xv
infirmity, yet stern enough on occasions, ever " turned
to flint by the insufferable proximity of a fool." His
musing on the Greenwich pensioners might pass for
sentiment, but the consul took into earnest considera-
tion the case of the queer old vagabond longing for
Ninety-second Street, Philadelphia, and toward that " be-
wildered enthusiast," Delia Bacon, who inspired perhaps
the most memorable pages of Our Old Home, his bear-
ing was worthy of any knight or saint. Their corre-
spondence, published in Theodore Bacon's Biographical
Sketch of his kinswoman, shows with what gentle-
ness, wisdom, and forbearance Hawthorne maintained
his difficult position of friend and adviser to one already
on the verge of insanity. For an author, style must be
the body of personality, and the inevitable grace of
Hawthorne's speech, what he calls, in reference to Leigh
Hunt, "the inscrutable happiness of his touch," is at
its best in these leisurely chapters. He may be telling
merely of a typical English village, whose dwellings
" all grow together, like the cells of a honeycomb," but
the phrase abides. Or he may turn from the contem-
plation of memorial statues in a cathedral, those of the
recently dead seeming already as much at home in that
dim marble realm as the quaint figures of far antiquity,
to say, in words that fall like the music of a voice:
" The dying melt into the great multitude of the De-
parted as quietly as a drop of water into the ocean, and,
it may be, are conscious of no unfamiliarity with their
new circumstances, but immediately become aware of
an insufferable strangeness in the world which they
have quitted. Death has not taken them away, but
brought them home."
Perhaps the two touches in the book which open up
most deeply the heart of Hawthorne are his feeling for
the scrofulous foundling of the Liverpool almshouse
who so confidently claimed his caresses, " as if God had
promised the poor child this favor," and his passionate
yearning over the children of the slums. " It might
almost make a man doubt the existence of his own soul,
to observe how Nature has flung these little wretches
xvi INTRODUCTION.
into the street and left them there. . . . Ah, what a
mystery ! Slowly, slowly, as after groping at the bot-
tom of a deep, noisome, stagnant pool, my hope struggles
upward to the surface, bearing the half-drowned body
of a child along with it, and heaving it aloft for its life,
and my own life, and all our lives. Unless these slime-
clogged nostrils can be made capable of inhaling celes-
tial air, I know not how the purest and most intellectual
of us can reasonably expect ever to taste a breath of it.
The whole question of eternity is staked there. If a
single one of those helpless little ones be lost, the world
is lost."
Such passages as these must needs persuade us that
if Our Old Home is not a great book, it is nevertheless
the book of a great soul.
KATHARINE LEE BATES.
TO A FRIEND
I HAVE not asked your consent, my dear General, to
the foregoing inscription, because it would have been
no inconsiderable disappointment to me had you with-
held it ; for I have long desired to connect your name
with some book of mine, in commemoration of an early
friendship that has grown old between two individuals
of widely dissimilar pursuits and fortunes. I only wish
that the offering were a worthier one than this volume
of sketches, which certainly are not of a kind likely to
prove interesting to a statesman in retirement, inasmuch
as they meddle with no matters of policy or government,
and have very little to say about the deeper traits of
national character. In their humble way, they belong
entirely to aesthetic literature, and can achieve no higher
^ success than to represent to the American reader a few
^ of the external aspects of English scenery and life, espe-
v cially those that are touched with the antique charm to
^ which our countrymen are more susceptible than are the
, people among whom it is of native growth.
^j I once hoped, indeed, that so slight a volume would
not be all that I might write. These and other sketches,
with which, in a somewhat rougher form than I have
given them here, my journal was copiously filled, were
intended for the side-scenes and backgrounds and exte-
rior adornment of a work of fiction of which the plan
had imperfectly developed itself in my mind, and into
which I ambitiously proposed to convey more of various
modes of truth than I could have grasped by a direct
effort. Of course, I should not mention this abortive
project, only that it has been utterly thrown aside and
will never now be accomplished. The Present, the Im-
mediate, the Actual, has proved too potent for me. It
xviii TO A FRIEND
takes away not only my scanty faculty, but even my
desire for imaginative composition, and leaves me sadly
content to scatter a thousand peaceful fantasies upon
the hurricane that is sweeping us all along with it, pos-
sibly, into a Limbo where our nation and its polity may
be as literally the fragments of a shattered dream as my
unwritten Romance. But I have far better hopes for
our dear country; and for my individual share of the
catastrophe, I afflict myself little, or not at all, and shall
easily find room for the abortive work on a certain ideal
shelf, where are reposited many other shadowy volumes
of mine, more in number, and very much superior in
quality, to those which I have succeeded in rendering
actual.
To return to these poor Sketches ; some of my friends
have told me that they evince an asperity of sentiment
towards the English people which I ought not to feel, and
which it is highly inexpedient to express. The charge
surprises me, because, if it be true, I have written from
a shallower mood than I supposed. I seldom came into
personal relations with an Englishman without begin-
ning to like him, and feeling my favorable impression
wax stronger with the progress of the acquaintance. I
never stood in an English crowd without being conscious
of hereditary sympathies. Nevertheless, it is undeniable
that an American is continually thrown upon his national
antagonism by some acrid quality in the moral atmos-
phere of England. These people think so loftily of
themselves, and so contemptuously of everybody else,
that it requires more generosity than I possess to keep
always in perfectly good humor with them. Jotting
down the little acrimonies of the moment in my journal,
and transferring them thence (when they happened to
be tolerably well expressed) to these pages, it is very
possible that I may have said things which a profound
observer of national character would hesitate to sanc-
tion, though never any, I verily believe, that had not
more or less of truth. If they be true, there is no