The Complete Novels. Nathaniel Hawthorne
the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing it. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in forming the hill-side behind the house into terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hill-side is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,—the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the sides or brow of the hill.
From the hill-top there is a good view along the extensive level surfaces and gentle, hilly outlines, covered with wood, that characterize the scenery of Concord. We have not so much as a gleam of lake or river in the prospect; if there were, it would add greatly to the value of the place in my estimation.
The house stands within ten or fifteen feet of the old Boston road (along which the British marched and retreated), divided from it by a fence, and some trees and shrubbery of Mr. Alcott's setting out. Whereupon I have called it "The Wayside," which I think a better name and more morally suggestive than that which, as Mr. Alcott has since told me, he bestowed on it,—"The Hill-Side." In front of the house, on the opposite side of the road, I have eight acres of land,—the only valuable portion of the place in a farmer's eye, and which are capable of being made very fertile. On the hither side, my territory extends some little distance over the brow of the hill, and is absolutely good for nothing, in a productive point of view, though very good for many other purposes.
I know nothing of the history of the house, except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabited a generation or two ago by a man who believed he should never die.[9] I believe, however, he is dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably appear and dispute my title to his residence....
I asked Ticknor to send a copy of "The Blithedale Romance" to you. Do not read it as if it had anything to do with Brook Farm (which essentially it has not), but merely for its own story and character.
Truly yours, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Quite possibly the name of The Wayside recommended itself to him by some association of thought like that which comes to light in the Preface to "The Snow-Image," where, speaking of the years immediately following his college course, he says: "I sat down by the wayside of life like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible through the entangling depths of my obscurity." If so, the simile held good as to his home; for there, too, the shrubbery has sprung up and has grown to saplings and trees, until the house is embosomed in a wood, except for the opening along the road and a small amphitheatre of lawn overlooked by the evergreen-clad hill.
Hawthorne's old college friend, Franklin Pierce, after having been to Congress and having risen to the rank of general in the Mexican War, was nominated by the democratic party for the presidency of the United States, at the time when the romancer had established himself in this humble but charming old abode; and it became manifest that the candidate wanted Hawthorne to write a life of him, for use in the campaign. Hawthorne, on being pressed, consented to do so, and a letter which he addressed to Bridge, October 13, 1852, contains some extremely interesting confidences on the subject, which will be entirely new to readers. As they do Hawthorne credit, if considered fairly, and give a striking presentment of the impartiality with which he viewed all subjects, it seems to be proper to print them here.
He begins by speaking of "The Blithedale Romance," regarding which he says: "I doubt whether you will like it very well; but it has met with good success, and has brought me (besides its American circulation) a thousand dollars from England, whence likewise have come many favorable notices. Just at this time, I rather think your friend stands foremost there as an American fiction-monger. In a day or two I intend to begin a new romance, which, if possible, I intend to make more genial than the last.
"I did not send you the Life of Pierce, not considering it fairly one of my literary productions.... I was terribly reluctant to undertake this work, and tried to persuade Pierce, both by letter and vivâ voce, that I could not perform it as well as many others; but he thought differently, and of course after a friendship of thirty years it was impossible to refuse my best efforts in his behalf, at the great pinch of his life. It was a bad book to write, for the gist of the matter lay in explaining how it happened, that with such extraordinary opportunities for eminent distinction, civil and military, as he has enjoyed, this crisis should have found him so obscure as he certainly was, in a national point of view. My heart absolutely sank at the dearth of available material. However, I have done the business, greatly to Frank's satisfaction; and, though I say it myself, it is judiciously done; and, without any sacrifice of truth, it puts him in as good a light as circumstances would admit. Other writers might have made larger claims for him, and have eulogized him more highly; but I doubt whether any other could have bestowed a better aspect of sincerity and reality on the narrative, and have secured all the credit possible for him without spoiling all by asserting too much. And though the story is true, yet it took a romancer to do it.
"Before undertaking it, I made an inward resolution that I would accept no office from him; but to say the truth, I doubt whether it would not be rather folly than heroism to adhere to this purpose, in case he should offer me anything particularly good. We shall see. A foreign mission I could not afford to take;—the consulship at Liverpool I might.... I have several invitations from English celebrities to come over there; and this office would make all straight. He certainly owes me something; for the biography has cost me hundreds of friends here at the North, who had a purer regard for me than Frank Pierce or any other politician ever gained, and who drop off from me like autumn leaves, in consequence of what I say on the slavery question. But they were my real sentiments, and I do not now regret that they are on record."
After discussing other topics, he observes further of Pierce: "I have come seriously to the conclusion that he has in him many of the chief elements of a great man; and that if he wins the election he may run a great career. His talents are administrative; he has a subtle faculty of making affairs roll around according to his will, and of influencing their course without showing any trace of his action." Hawthorne did not feel very confident of his friend's election. "I love him," he adds, "and, oddly enough, there is a kind of pitying sentiment mixed with my affection for him just now."
Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard has set down his reminiscences of two visits paid to Hawthorne at the beginning and after the end of the campaign. In the summer of 1852, Mr. Stoddard was making a short stay in Boston, and dropped in at the Old Corner Bookstore to call upon Mr. Fields, who then had his headquarters there. He found Mr. Edwin P. Whipple, the lecturer and critic, sitting with the publisher.
"'We are going to see Hawthorne,' Mr. Fields remarked, in an off-hand way, as if such a visit was the commonest thing in the world. 'Won't you come along?' He knew my admiration for Hawthorne, and that I desired to meet him, if I could do so without being considered an infliction. 'To be sure I will,' I replied.... When we were fairly seated in the train we met a friend of Hawthorne, whom Mr. Fields knew—a Colonel T. I. Whipple—who, like ourselves, was en route for Concord, ... and as General Pierce was then the democratic candidate for the presidency, he was going to see Hawthorne, in order to furnish materials for that work.
"We reached The Wayside, where Hawthorne, who had no doubt been expecting visitors, met us at the door. I was introduced to him as being the only stranger of the party, and was greeted warmly, more so than I had dared to hope, remembering the stories I had heard of his unconquerable shyness. He threw open the door of the room on the left,