Hostname: page-component-cc8bf7c57-8cnds Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-12T03:41:32.660Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Nemesis and Nathaniel Hawthorne

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Oscar Cargill
Oscar Cargill*
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

No literary quarrel in European annals surpasses for rancor the American one which involved the Peabodys, the Channings, the Hawthornes, and Margaret Fuller in the second quarter of the nineteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , September 1937 , pp. 848 - 862
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1937

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 First published by Julian Hawthorne in Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, 2 vols., 1885), I, 259–262. F. T. Fuller, nephew of Margaret Fuller, in a communication addressed to the Literary World (xvi, 11–15), of Jan. 10, 1885, writes, “Biographers have not often the will, even if the power, to inflict such wounds as the friends and relatives of Margaret Fuller Ossoli have received at the hand of the compiler of the recently issued memoir of Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife … I think I do Mr. Julian Hawthorne only simple justice in saying that his publication of this extract is to be ascribed to no other cause than that he is not one to spoil a sensation to save a friend.”

2 Katherine Anthony, Margaret Fuller, A Psychological Biography (New York, 1920), p. 92.

3 “Pearl kissed his lips. A spell was broken. The great scene of grief, in which the wild infant bore a part, had developed all her sympathies. …” The Scarlet Letter, M.S.L. ed. (New York, 1919), p. 263. See pp. 267–268 for Pearl's later normal life.

4 For Hawthorne's reading see G. P. Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne (Boston, 1876), pp. 164–165 and Appendix. For his Calvinism, see Austin Warren, Hawthorne (New York, 1934), pp. xix-xxxiv.

5 So Julian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife, quoting American Note-books, July 29, 1849. Cf. The American Note-books, ed. Randall Stewart (1932), pp. 206–210.

6 Boston Daily Advertiser, Nov. 27, 1834.

7 Letter to Dr. Hedge, Mar. 6, 1835. See T. W. Higginson, Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1884), pp. 48–50.

8 Hawthorne and His Wife, i, 195.

9 Lathrop, p. 181; Hawthorne and His Wife, i, 195–199.

10 Alcott's unpublished diary, Aug. 2, 1836. Quoted, Higginson, p. 74.

11 Higginson, pp. 75–80.

12 Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli (Boston, 1851), I, 281.

13 Ibid., I, 283–284.

14 F. B. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years (Boston, 2 vols., 1909), ii, 548. Quotations from Parker's journal of 1839 in Clarence Gohdes, Periodicals of American Transcendentalism (Durham, North Carolina, 1931), p. 144.

15 Gohdes, p. 146; Henry Barnard, American Journal of Education (Hartford), xxx 584 ff.

16 Higginson, p. 114.

17 Emerson, Journal, viii, 118.

18 Gohdes, p. 71, quoting M. F. Ossoli MSS, in Boston Public Library.

19 The American Note-books (R. Stewart), p. 315, quoting a letter in the Harvard Library.

20 Ibid., pp. 293–294, quoting Love Letters, 1,232.

21 American Note-books, ed. Sophia Hawthorne (Boston, 1883), p. 229.

22 Higginson, p. 179.

23 Memoirs of M.F.O., i, 218; Am. Note-books (R. Stewart), pp. 159, 169, 315. F. T. Fuller, who corroborates this from Margaret's diary, adds that she took care of the baby Una while Hawthorne and Sophia went out for walks. Of Una, Margaret wrote, “Next to little Waldo [Emerson], I love her better than any child I ever saw.” Op. cit., p. 12.

24 American Note-books (R. Stewart), pp. 160, 315, 317.

25 Ibid., p. 315; also F. T. Fuller, pp. 11–15.

26 Hawthorne and His Wife, I, pp. 252–256; M. D. Conway, Life of Hawthorne (New York, n.d.), p. 95.

27 Ellery Channing, Poems of Sixty-five Years, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Concord, 1902), pp. xiv, xix-xx, xliii.

28 Ibid., pp. xxxv-xxxviii.

29 American Note-books (R. Stewart), p. 168.

30 Ibid., p. 312.

31 Ibid., p. 175.

32 Hawthorne and His Wife, p. 248; Poems of Sixty-five Years, pp. xx-xxi; see also American Note-books (R. Stewart), p. 312.

33 Hawthorne and His Wife, p. 64.

34 “I have but one reason for settling in one place in America: it is because you are there.” Charming to Emerson, Poems of Sixty-five Years, p. xx, See also pp. 87, 104–127, 137, 175, etc.

35 Ibid., p. 111. This poem is No. I in “Poems of the Heart” in Poems: Second Series (Boston, 1847), pp. 108–110, where its position indicates the poet's affection for the novelist.

36 For example, in Lowell's A Fable for Critics, 11. 226–243, and Holmes' “At the Saturday Club,” 11. 105–120. These men were not intimate with Hawthorne.

37 See Walter Savage Landor, “Count Julian,” The Works and Life of W.S.L. (London, 1876), vii, 45–100.

38 Poems of Sixty-five Years, p. 113. This poem is No. VII in Poems: Second Series, pp. 114–115.

39 Journal, viii, 257.

40 Works, pop. ed. (Boston, 1882), ii, 27–31.

41 Ibid., p. 149. Called to my attention by N. F. Adkins, whose knowledge of Hawthorne has been of great service to me.

42 Ibid., p. 170.

43 American Note-books (Mrs. Hawthorne), p. 408, entry for Oct. 29, 1851; the Hawthornes left Lenox Nov. 21,1851.

44 Poems of Sixty-five Years, pp. 118–119. The poem is not addressed to Hawthorne by name, yet there is no escaping the fact that it was addressed to him. It is one of the group called “Poems of the Heart” in which the poet pays tribute to Emerson, Hawthorne, Alcott, Elizabeth Hoar, and Thoreau—one of whom is meant as the unfaithful friend. No quarrel can be shown with the others; indeed, in later life Channing wrote tributes to all the others save Hawthorne. On the other hand, it can be shown that Hawthorne changed his attitude towards Ellery Channing between 1850 and 1856. In the “Custom-House” sketch in The Scarlet Letter (1850), p. 25, Hawthorne refers to Ellery very much as he had done in Mosses from an Old Manse, but in the English Note-books, entry for Apr. 5, 1856, Hawthorne writes, “as for Mr. Douglas Jerrold, he often reminded me of E—–C—–, in the rich veins of the latter, both by his face and expression, and by a tincture of something at once wise and humorously absurd in what he said. But I think he has a kinder, more genial, wholesomer nature than E—–.”

Further, the portrait fits the novelist. Who loved solitude, retirement, etc., more than Hawthorne? Note that, in line 3 of the poem, Channing calls the unfaithful friend “the Student”—an epithet like “a scholar of rare worth” in line 4 of “Hawthorne in the Old Manse.” None other of the group is called student or scholar. Note especially how appropriate to Hawthorne, because of his connection with the Salem Custom House, is the phrase, “my quarantine.”

Moreover, the unfaithful friend had some connection with Lenox, where Ellery visited Hawthorne. The sonnet, “An Estranged Friend,” which immediately precedes “Unfaithful Friendship,” “was written, says the manuscript, ‘in the road between L. and S.,‘ which I take to be Lenox and Stockbridge. The year must have been 1845 or 1846” (Sanborn's headnote). Sanborn was unaware that Channing was in Lenox in 1851. Discretion would not have kept the poem out of the 1847 volume of Channing's verse had it been written at that time.

45 American Note-books (R. Stewart), p. 123.

46 Op. cit., pp. 15–17.

47 W. B. Cairns, A History of American Literature (New York, 1912), p. 312.

48 Conway, p. 106.

49 American Note-books (R. Stewart), pp. liv, 288.

50 Conway, p. 106.

51 Works, pop. ed., ii, 174.

52 Conway, p. 92. This is also attributed to Tom Appleton.

53 See Love-Letters of Margaret Fuller, 1845–1846, with an introd. by J. W. Howe (New York, 1903); Margaret Bell, Margaret Fuller (New York, 1930), pp. 171–208.

54 Memoirs of M.F.O., ii, pp. 341–352.

55 “These characters . . . are entirely fictitious. It would, indeed (considering how few amiable qualities he distributes among his imaginary progeny), be a most grievous wrong to his former excellent associates, were the author to allow it to be supposed he has been sketching any of their likenesses …” Preface, The Blithedale Romance in Works, Pop. ed., ii, vii.

56 Margaret Fuller Ossoli, p. 173. F. T. Fuller accepts the identification.

57 The first discussion of the project was at Emerson's with Alcott, Miss Fuller, and George Ripley in attendance, Ibid., pp. 180–181. Miss Fuller, after a first enthusiasm (Memoirs, i, p. 57), became skeptical (Ibid., i, pp. 72–75) much like Hawthorne himself later on. For Elizabeth Peabody, see: “A Glimpse at Christ's Idea of Society,” Dial (Oct., 1841), ii, 214 ff.

58 “My position would be too uncertain here as I could not work.” Memoirs, ii, 75.

59 See Ibid., ii, pp. 73–80; Higginson, pp. 179–186; J. W.Howe, Margaret Fuller (Boston, 1854), pp. 97–99; O. B. Frothingham, George Ripley (Boston, 1866), pp. 150–151.

60 Op. cit., p. 43.

61 At “receptions to literary friends” she presided as “a gracious hostess with a white japonica in her hair.” Higginson, p. 211. Note especially Miss Fuller's “flower sketches” written for the Dial and other magazines (see Ibid., pp. 96–97): “Inheriting a love of flowers . . . she gave to them meanings and mysticisms of her own.”

62 Op. cit., pp. 94–95.

63 Ibid., p. 64.

64 At Home and Abroad, ed. A. B. Fuller (Boston, 1856), pp. 69–75.

65 Ibid., p. 75.

66 Ibid., p. 451.

67 Bell, pp. 113–115. Note that Margaret in the company of Sam Ward once called upon the Hawthornes. American Note-books (R. Stewart), p. 169.

68 Op. cit., pp. 57–58.

69 Ibid., p. 59.

70 He finished the novel, May 1, 1852, and read proof on it throughout May. American Note-books (R. Stewart), p. 335. It was apparently published in June, 1852.

71 Life of Hawthorne, p. 143.

72 Journal, May 24, 1864.

73 Ellery Channing had the final word in the controversy, but was so weak that he could not make up his mind whether it was expedient to assail Hawthorne or not. Consequently, under “Personalities” in his Thoreau: the Poet-Naturalist (Boston, 1873) he writes of the novelist: “… He [Thoreau] wasted none of his precious jewels, his moments, upon epistles to the class of Rosa Matilda invalids, some of whom like leeches fastened upon his homely cuticle, but did not draw. Of this gilt vermoulu, the sugar-gingerbread of Sympathy, Hawthorne had as much. There was a blank simper, an insufficient sort of affliction, at your petted sorrow, in the story-teller—more consoling than the boiled macaroni of pathos. Hawthorne—swallowed up in the wretchedness of life, in that sardonic puritan element that drips from the elms of his birthplace—thought it inexpressibly ridiculous that anyone should notice man's miseries, these being his staple product. . . . It is believed that Hawthorne truly admired Thoreau. A vein of humour had they both;

and when they laughed, like Shelley, the operation was sufficient to split a pitcher. Hawthorne could have said: 'People live as long in Pepper Alley as on Salisbury Plain; and they live so much happier that an inhabitant of the first would, if he turned cottager, starve his understanding for want of conversation and perish in a state of mental inferiority.' Henry would never have believed it. . . [Thoreau] never went to nor voted at a town meeting . . . nor often did things he could not understand. In these respects Hawthorne mimicked him. The Concord novelist was a handsome, bulky character, with a soft, rolling gait. A wit said he seemed like a boned pirate. Shy and awkward, he dreaded the stranger in his gates; while, as inspector, he was employed to swear the oaths versus English colliers. When surveyor, finding rum sent to the African coast was watered, he vowed he would not ship another gill if it was anything but pure proof spirit. Such was his justice to the oppressed. One of the things he most dreaded was to be looked at after he was dead. Being at a friend's demise, of whose extinction he had the care, he enjoyed—as if it had been a scene in some old Spanish novel—his success in keeping the waiters from stealing the costly wines sent in to the sick. Careless of heat and cold indoors, he lived in an aeolian-harp house, that could not be warmed: that he entered it by a trap door from a ladder is false. Lovely, amiable, and charming, his absent-mindedness passed for unsocial when he was hatching a new tragedy. As a writer he loves the morbid and lame. The “Gentle Boy” and “Scarlet Letter” eloped with the girls' boarding schools. His reputation is master of his literary taste. His characters are not drawn from life; his plots and thoughts are often dreary, as he was himself in some lights. . . .,“ pp. 257–259.