In so far as Hawthorne suffered the penalties of
celebrity at the hands of intrusive fellow citizens, he was soon to escape from
this honorable incommodity. On the 4th of March, 1853, his old college-mate and
intimate friend, Franklin Pierce, was installed as President of the United
States. He had been a candidate of the Democratic party, and all good
Democrats, accordingly, in conformity to the beautiful and rational system
under which the affairs of the great Republic carried on, began to open their
windows to the golden sunshine of Presidential patronage.
When general Pierce was put forward by the Democrats, Hawthorne felt a perfectly loyal and natural desire that his good friend should be exalted to so brilliant a position, and he did what was in him to further the good cause, by writing a little book about its hero. His Life of Franklin Pierce belongs to that class of literature which is known as the ‘campaign biography,’ and which consists of an attempt, more or less successful, to persuade the many-headed monster of universal suffrage that the gentleman on whose behalf it is addressed is a paragon of wisdom and virtue.
Of Hawthorne’s little book there is nothing particular to say, save that it is in very good taste, that he is a fairly ingenious advocate, and that if he claimed for the future President qualities which rather faded in the bright light of high office, this defect of proportion was essential to his undertaking. He dwelt chiefly upon General Pierce’s exploits in the war with Mexico (before that, his record, as they say in America, had been mainly that of a successful country lawyer), and exercised his descriptive powers so far a it was possible in describing the advance of the United States troops from Vera Cruz to the city of the Montezumas.
The mouth-pieces of the Whig party spared Hawthorne, I believe, no reprobation for ‘prostituting’ his exquisite genius; but I fail to see anything reprehensible in Hawthorne lending his old friend the assistance of his graceful quill. He wished him to be President – he held afterwards that he filled the office with admirable dignity and wisdom – and as the only thing he could do was write, he fell to work and wrote for him. Hawthorne was a good lover, and a very sufficient partisan., and I suspect that if Franklin Pierce had been made even less of the stuff of a statesman, he still would have found in the force of old association an injunction to hail him as a ruler.
Our hero was an American of an earlier and simpler type –the type of which it is doubtless premature to say has wholly passed away, but of which it may at least be said that the circumstances that produced it have been greatly modified. The generation to which he belonged, that generation which grew up with the century, witnessed during a period of fifty years the immense, uninterrupted material development of the young Republic; and when one thinks of the scale on which it took place, of the prosperity that walked in its train and waited on its course, of the hopes it fostered and the blessings it conferred, on the broad morning sunshine, in a word, in which it all went forward, thee seems to be little room for surprise that it should have implanted a kind of superstitious faith in the grandeur of the country, its duration, its immunity from the usual troubles of earthy empires. This faith was a simple and uncritical one, enlivened with an element of genial optimism, in the light of which appeared that the great American state was not as other human institutions are, that a special Providence watched over it, that it would go on joyously forever, and that a country whose vast and blooming bosom offered are refuge to the strugglers and seekers of all the rest of the world, must come off easily, in the battle of the ages.
From this conception of the American future the sense of having its problems to solve was blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the program, no looming complications, no rocks ahead. The indefinite multiplication of the population, and its enjoyment of the benefits of a common-school education and of unusual facilities for making an income – this was the form in which, on the whole, the future most vividly presented itself, and in which the greatness of the country was to be recognized of men. There was indeed a faint shadow in the picture -the shadow projected by the ‘peculiar institution’ of the Southern States; but it was far from sufficient to darken the rosy vision of most good Americans, and above all, most good Democrats. Hawthorne alludes to it in a passage of his life of Pierce, which I will quote not only as a hint of the trouble that was in store for a cheerful race of men, but as an example of his own easy-going political attitude.
It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin took a stand on the slavery question from which he has never since swerved by a hair’s breadth. He fully recognized by his votes and voice, the rights pledge to the South by the Constitution. This, at the period when he declared himself, as an easy thing to do. But when it became more difficult, when the first imperceptible murmur of agitation had grown to a convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern man who dared to live that great and sacred reality- his whole united country – better than the mistiness of philanthropic theory.
This last invidious allusion is to the disposition, not infrequent at the North, but by no means general, to set a decisive limit to further legislation in favor of the cherished idiosyncrasy of the other half of the country. Hawthorne takes the license of a sympathetic biographer in speaking of his hero’s having incurred obloquy by his conservative attitude on the question of Slavery. The only class in the American world that suffered in the smallest degree, at this time, from social persecution, was the little band of Northern Abolitionists, who were as unfashionable as they were indiscreet – which is saying much. Like most of his fellow countrymen, Hawthorne ha no idea that the respectable institution which he contemplated in impressive contrast to humanitarian ‘mistiness,’ was presently to cost the nation four long years of bloodshed and misery, and a social revolution as complete as the world has ever seen. When this event occurred, he was therefore proportionately horrified and depressed by it; it cut from beneath his feet the familiar ground which had long felt so firm, substituting a heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest.
Such was the bewildered sensation of that earlier and simpler generation of which I have spoken; their illusions were rudely dispelled, and they saw the best of all possible republics given over to fratricidal carnage. This affair had no place in their scheme, and nothing was left for them but to hang their heads and close their eyes.
The subsidence of that great convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it found, and one may say that the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult. At the rate at which things were going, it is obvious that good Americans will be more numerous than ever, but the good American, in the days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will not, I think, be a skeptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer. He will remember the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and that this world in which everything happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was for this reason Franklin Pierce seemed to him a very proper President.
The least that General Pierce could do in exchange for so liberal a confidence was to offer his old friend one of the numerous places in his gift. Hawthorne had a great desire to go abroad and see something of the world, so that a consulate seemed the proper thing. He never stirred in the matter himself, but his friends strongly urged that something should be done; and when he accepted the post of consul at Liverpool there was not a word of reasonable criticism to be offered.
If General Pierce, who was before all things good natured and obliging, had been guilty of no greater indiscretion than to confer a modest distinction upon the most honorable and discrete men of letters, he would have made a more brilliant mark in the annals of American statesmanship. . .
In truth, for many persons Hawthorne’s great, his most touching sign will have been his aloofness wherever he is. He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. It was a faculty that gave him much more a terrible sense of human abysses than a desire to rashly sound them and rise to the surface with his report. On the surface – the surface of the soul and the edge of tragedy – he preferred to remain. He lingered, to weave his web, in the thin exterior air. This is a partial expression of his characteristic habit of dipping, of diving just for sport, into the moral world without being in the least a moralist. He had none of the heat nor of the dogmatism of that character; none of the impertinence, as we feel he would almost have held it, of any intermeddling. He never intermeddled; he was divertedly and discretely contemplative, pausing oftenest wherever, amid prosaic aspects, there seemed most of an appeal to the sense of subtleties. But of all the cynics he was the brightest and the kindest, and the subtleties he spun are mere silken threads for stringing polished beads. His collection of moral mysteries is the cabinet of a dilettante.
When general Pierce was put forward by the Democrats, Hawthorne felt a perfectly loyal and natural desire that his good friend should be exalted to so brilliant a position, and he did what was in him to further the good cause, by writing a little book about its hero. His Life of Franklin Pierce belongs to that class of literature which is known as the ‘campaign biography,’ and which consists of an attempt, more or less successful, to persuade the many-headed monster of universal suffrage that the gentleman on whose behalf it is addressed is a paragon of wisdom and virtue.
Of Hawthorne’s little book there is nothing particular to say, save that it is in very good taste, that he is a fairly ingenious advocate, and that if he claimed for the future President qualities which rather faded in the bright light of high office, this defect of proportion was essential to his undertaking. He dwelt chiefly upon General Pierce’s exploits in the war with Mexico (before that, his record, as they say in America, had been mainly that of a successful country lawyer), and exercised his descriptive powers so far a it was possible in describing the advance of the United States troops from Vera Cruz to the city of the Montezumas.
The mouth-pieces of the Whig party spared Hawthorne, I believe, no reprobation for ‘prostituting’ his exquisite genius; but I fail to see anything reprehensible in Hawthorne lending his old friend the assistance of his graceful quill. He wished him to be President – he held afterwards that he filled the office with admirable dignity and wisdom – and as the only thing he could do was write, he fell to work and wrote for him. Hawthorne was a good lover, and a very sufficient partisan., and I suspect that if Franklin Pierce had been made even less of the stuff of a statesman, he still would have found in the force of old association an injunction to hail him as a ruler.
Our hero was an American of an earlier and simpler type –the type of which it is doubtless premature to say has wholly passed away, but of which it may at least be said that the circumstances that produced it have been greatly modified. The generation to which he belonged, that generation which grew up with the century, witnessed during a period of fifty years the immense, uninterrupted material development of the young Republic; and when one thinks of the scale on which it took place, of the prosperity that walked in its train and waited on its course, of the hopes it fostered and the blessings it conferred, on the broad morning sunshine, in a word, in which it all went forward, thee seems to be little room for surprise that it should have implanted a kind of superstitious faith in the grandeur of the country, its duration, its immunity from the usual troubles of earthy empires. This faith was a simple and uncritical one, enlivened with an element of genial optimism, in the light of which appeared that the great American state was not as other human institutions are, that a special Providence watched over it, that it would go on joyously forever, and that a country whose vast and blooming bosom offered are refuge to the strugglers and seekers of all the rest of the world, must come off easily, in the battle of the ages.
From this conception of the American future the sense of having its problems to solve was blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the program, no looming complications, no rocks ahead. The indefinite multiplication of the population, and its enjoyment of the benefits of a common-school education and of unusual facilities for making an income – this was the form in which, on the whole, the future most vividly presented itself, and in which the greatness of the country was to be recognized of men. There was indeed a faint shadow in the picture -the shadow projected by the ‘peculiar institution’ of the Southern States; but it was far from sufficient to darken the rosy vision of most good Americans, and above all, most good Democrats. Hawthorne alludes to it in a passage of his life of Pierce, which I will quote not only as a hint of the trouble that was in store for a cheerful race of men, but as an example of his own easy-going political attitude.
It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin took a stand on the slavery question from which he has never since swerved by a hair’s breadth. He fully recognized by his votes and voice, the rights pledge to the South by the Constitution. This, at the period when he declared himself, as an easy thing to do. But when it became more difficult, when the first imperceptible murmur of agitation had grown to a convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the Northern man who dared to live that great and sacred reality- his whole united country – better than the mistiness of philanthropic theory.
This last invidious allusion is to the disposition, not infrequent at the North, but by no means general, to set a decisive limit to further legislation in favor of the cherished idiosyncrasy of the other half of the country. Hawthorne takes the license of a sympathetic biographer in speaking of his hero’s having incurred obloquy by his conservative attitude on the question of Slavery. The only class in the American world that suffered in the smallest degree, at this time, from social persecution, was the little band of Northern Abolitionists, who were as unfashionable as they were indiscreet – which is saying much. Like most of his fellow countrymen, Hawthorne ha no idea that the respectable institution which he contemplated in impressive contrast to humanitarian ‘mistiness,’ was presently to cost the nation four long years of bloodshed and misery, and a social revolution as complete as the world has ever seen. When this event occurred, he was therefore proportionately horrified and depressed by it; it cut from beneath his feet the familiar ground which had long felt so firm, substituting a heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest.
Such was the bewildered sensation of that earlier and simpler generation of which I have spoken; their illusions were rudely dispelled, and they saw the best of all possible republics given over to fratricidal carnage. This affair had no place in their scheme, and nothing was left for them but to hang their heads and close their eyes.
The subsidence of that great convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it found, and one may say that the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it hitherto seemed, the future more treacherous, success more difficult. At the rate at which things were going, it is obvious that good Americans will be more numerous than ever, but the good American, in the days to come, will be a more critical person than his complacent and confident grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will not, I think, be a skeptic, and still less, of course, a cynic; but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for action, an observer. He will remember the ways of the Lord are inscrutable, and that this world in which everything happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French used to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a specimen was not critical, and it was for this reason Franklin Pierce seemed to him a very proper President.
The least that General Pierce could do in exchange for so liberal a confidence was to offer his old friend one of the numerous places in his gift. Hawthorne had a great desire to go abroad and see something of the world, so that a consulate seemed the proper thing. He never stirred in the matter himself, but his friends strongly urged that something should be done; and when he accepted the post of consul at Liverpool there was not a word of reasonable criticism to be offered.
If General Pierce, who was before all things good natured and obliging, had been guilty of no greater indiscretion than to confer a modest distinction upon the most honorable and discrete men of letters, he would have made a more brilliant mark in the annals of American statesmanship. . .
In truth, for many persons Hawthorne’s great, his most touching sign will have been his aloofness wherever he is. He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. It was a faculty that gave him much more a terrible sense of human abysses than a desire to rashly sound them and rise to the surface with his report. On the surface – the surface of the soul and the edge of tragedy – he preferred to remain. He lingered, to weave his web, in the thin exterior air. This is a partial expression of his characteristic habit of dipping, of diving just for sport, into the moral world without being in the least a moralist. He had none of the heat nor of the dogmatism of that character; none of the impertinence, as we feel he would almost have held it, of any intermeddling. He never intermeddled; he was divertedly and discretely contemplative, pausing oftenest wherever, amid prosaic aspects, there seemed most of an appeal to the sense of subtleties. But of all the cynics he was the brightest and the kindest, and the subtleties he spun are mere silken threads for stringing polished beads. His collection of moral mysteries is the cabinet of a dilettante.
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