THE SCARLET LETTER & A SCARLET STIGMA (Illustrated). Nathaniel Hawthorne
I would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two of dollars rather than retain the good-will of such a herd of dolts and mean-spirited scoundrels." The language did not lack vigor and warmth; but Dr. Loring has stated that he spoke of the matter to the same effect, "not in the heat of passion, but with a calm and generous courage." The dedicatory letter was printed, of course, and drew down upon Hawthorne abundant condemnation; but he had maintained his integrity.
The shock of such an accident was by no means the right sort of tonic for a man of Hawthorne's sensitive disposition when he was already feeble and almost ill. In April, 1862, he had been to Washington, and the things that impressed him there were noted down in an "Atlantic Monthly" paper, entitled "Chiefly About War Matters." At Washington, also, Leutze painted a portrait of him for General Pierce. In July, he took a brief trip with his son to the Maine coast, and began a new journal. There were no other changes of scene for him; the monotony of his life at The Wayside was seldom broken. That this period was for him one of unmitigated gloom cannot truthfully be predicated; he enjoyed his home, he had the society of his wife and children; he had many small and quiet pleasures. But there was likewise much to make him sorrowful, and the tide of vitality was steadily ebbing away. In May, 1863, James Russell Lowell invited him to Elmwood, and Hawthorne agreed to go, but he was finally prevented from doing so by a troublesome cold. The slow and mysterious disease, which was to prove fatal within a year, continued to make inroads upon his constitution. After the publication of "Our Old Home," in the autumn of 1863, there is no certain record of his condition or his proceedings, beyond this, that he went on declining, and that—having abandoned the two preceding phases of his new fiction—he attempted to write the resultant form of it, which was to have been brought out as "The Dolliver Romance."
Although the title had not yet been determined upon, he consented to begin a serial publication of the work in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864. But he wrote to Mr. Fields: "I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel as if I should never carry it through.... I can think of no title for the unborn Romance. Always heretofore I have waited till it was quite complete, before attempting to name it, and I fear I shall have to do so now." On the 1st of December, he dispatched the manuscript of the first chapter, with the title of the whole. But he could not follow it up with more, and wrote, about the middle of January, 1864: "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success." At the end of February: "I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish it..., I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death." From this time on he accomplished no work which he was willing to send to the press, although he had among his papers the two fragmentary scenes from "The Dolliver Romance" that were posthumously printed.
The wife of ex-President Pierce died in December, 1863, and Hawthorne went to New Hampshire to attend the funeral. When he passed through Boston, on his return, he appeared to Mr. Fields ill and more nervous than usual. Dreary events seemed to thicken around his path. In the last days of March, 1864, Mr. Fields saw him again; and by this time his appearance had greatly changed. "The light in his eye was as beautiful as ever, but his limbs were shrunken, and his usual stalwart vigor [was] utterly gone." A photograph taken not long before that date represents him with cheeks somewhat emaciated, and a worn, strangely anxious, half-appealing expression, which, while singularly delicate and noble, is extremely sad. Soon after this, in March, he set out for Washington with Mr. William Ticknor, Mr. Fields's senior partner in the publishing firm of Ticknor & Fields. The travelling companions spent two or three days in New York, and had got as far as Philadelphia, when Mr. Ticknor was taken suddenly ill, at the Continental Hotel, and died the next day. Stunned, wellnigh shattered by this sinister event, Hawthorne was almost incapacitated for action of any sort; but there were kind and ready friends in Philadelphia who came to his aid, and relieved him from the melancholy duty which he would else have had to meet. He returned to Concord, in what forlorn state an extract from a letter of Mrs. Hawthorne's may best convey: "He came back unlooked for, that day; and when I heard a step on the piazza, I was lying on a couch and feeling quite indisposed. But as soon as I saw him I was frightened out of all knowledge of myself,—so haggard, so white, so deeply scored with pain and fatigue was the face, so much more ill than ever I saw him before." Mrs. Hawthorne still hoped for some favorable turn, if he could but obtain a complete change of scene and escape from the austere New England spring, into some warmer climate. "He has not smiled since he came home till to-day," she wrote, "when I made him laugh, with Thackeray's humor, in reading to him." She was constant in her care; she would scarcely let him go up and down stairs alone. But not the most tender solicitude, nor any encouragement of unquenchable hope, could now avail to help him.
The only stratagem that could be devised to win back health and strength was the plan proposed by General Pierce, to take Hawthorne with him on an easy journey by carriage into New Hampshire. They started in May,—the two old college-mates; the ex-President so lately widowed and still in the shadow of his own bereavement, with the famous romancer so mournfully broken, who was never more to be seen in life by those to whom he was dearest. From the Pemigewasset House at Plymouth, New Hampshire, where they had stopped for the night, General Pierce sent the news on May 19, that Hawthorne was dead. "He retired last night," wrote the General, "soon after nine o'clock, and soon fell into a quiet slumber.... At two o'clock I went to H——'s bedside; he was apparently in a sound sleep; and I did not place my hand upon him. At four o'clock I went into his room again, and, as his position was unchanged, I placed my hand upon him and found that life was extinct.... He must have passed from natural slumber to that from which there is no waking, without the slightest movement."
Hawthorne was buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord, on the 24th of May, 1864. The grave was made beneath the shadowing pines of a hill near one of the borders of the beautiful, wooded burial-ground, whence there is a peaceful view over the valley of the Concord River. It was close to the slope where Thoreau now lies, and not far away is the grassy resting-place of Emerson. The spot was one for which Hawthorne had cherished an especial fondness. Emerson, that day, stood beside the grave, and with him Longfellow and Lowell were present; Agassiz, Holmes, James Freeman Clarke, Edwin Whipple, Pierce, and Hillard, had all assembled to pay their last reverence. A great multitude of people attended the funeral service at the old Unitarian First Church in the village, and Mr. Clarke, who had performed the marriage ceremony for Hawthorne, conducted the rites above him dead. It was a perfect day of spring; the roadside banks were blue with violets, the orchards were in bloom; and lilies of the valley, which were Hawthorne's favorites among flowers, had blossomed early as if for him, and were gathered in masses about him. Like a requiem chant, the clear strains that Longfellow wrote in memory of that hour still echo for us its tender solemnity:—
"How beautiful it was, that one bright day
In the long week of rain!
Though all its splendor could not chase away
The omnipresent pain.
"The lovely town was white with apple-blooms,
And the great elms o'erhead
Dark shadows wove on their aerial looms,
Shot through with golden thread.
"Across the meadows, by the gray old manse,
The historic river flowed;
I was as one who wanders in a trance,
Unconscious of his road.
"The faces of familiar friends seemed strange;
Their voices I could hear,
And yet the words they uttered seemed to change
Their meaning to the ear.
"For the one face I looked for was not there,
The one low voice was mute;
Only an unseen presence filled the air,
And baffled my pursuit.
"Now I look back, and meadow, manse, and stream
Dimly my thought defines;