Delphi Complete Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Illustrated) (733 page)

The election of Pierce to the presidency was as remarkable as his nomination. In 1848, General Taylor, the victor of a single battle, but a man of little education, was nominated for the presidency over the heads of the finest orators and ablest statesmen in America, and was enthusiastically elected. General Scott, Franklin Pierce's opponent, defeated the Mexicans in four decisive battles, captured the capital of the country, and conducted one of the most skilful military expeditions of the past century. He was a man of rare administrative ability, and there is no substantial argument against his character. We have Grant's testimony that it was pleasant to serve under him. Yet he was overwhelmingly defeated at the polls by a militia general without distinction, military or civil.

Hawthorne was naturally delighted at the result of the election; unfortunate as it afterwards proved for his country. He derived a threefold satisfaction from it, in the success of his friend, in the defeat of the Whigs, and in the happy prospects which it opened for himself. He could now return to the Salem Custom House in triumph, — as the wisest man might be tempted to do, — but he looked forward to something that would be more advantageous to his family. He had already written on October 18 to Horatio Bridge:

“Before undertaking it [the biography] I made an inward resolution, that I should 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.” [Footnote: Bridge 130]

We may conclude from this, that Pierce had already intimated the Liverpool consulate, which at that time was supposed to be worth twenty-five thousand dollars a year in fees. It was an excellent plan for the President of the United States to have such a gift at his disposal, to reward some individual like Hawthorne, to whom the whole nation was indebted to an extent that could never be repaid; but it is a question whether it would not have been as well, in this particular case, for Hawthorne to have remained in his own country. If he could have written five or six romances more, this would have secured him a good competency, and would have assured a sufficient income for his family after his death. As it happened, the Liverpool consulate did not prove so profitable as was anticipated.

With such “great expectations” before him, Hawthorne could do no serious work that winter, so he occupied himself leisurely enough, with writing a sequel to his “Wonder Book,” which he called “Tanglewood Tales,” apparently after the thicket which surmounted the hill above his residence. This was finished early in March, and given to Ticknor & Company to publish when they saw fit. As it is a book intended for children, the consideration of it need not detain us.

Early in April, 1853, Hawthorne was appointed and confirmed to the Liverpool consulate, and on the 14th he went to Washington, as he tells us, for the first time, to thank the President in person. Otherwise he has divulged nothing concerning this journey, except that he was introduced to a larger number of persons than he could remember the names or faces of, and received ten times as many invitations as he could accept. If Charles V. honored himself with posterity by picking up the paint-brush which Titian had dropped on the floor, President Pierce might have done himself equal credit by making Hawthorne his guest at the White House; but if he did not go so far as this, it cannot be doubted that he treated Hawthorne handsomely. There were giants at Washington in those days. Webster and Clay were gone, but Seward was the Charles Fox and Sumner the Edmund Burke of America; Chase and Marcy were not much less in intellectual stature. Hawthorne must have met them, but we hear nothing of them from him.

Hawthorne delayed his departure for England, until the most favorable season arrived, for his fragile wife and infant children to cross the “rolling forties.” At length, on July 6, two days after his forty-ninth birthday, he sailed from Boston in the “Niagara,” and with
placida onda prospero il vento
, in about twelve days they all arrived safely at their destination.

The great stone docks of Liverpool, extending along its whole water- front, give one a strong impression of the power and solidity of England. Otherwise the city is almost devoid of interest, and travellers customarily pass through it, to take the next train for Oxford or London, without further observation, unless it be to give a look at the conventional statue of Prince Albert on an Arab horse. Liverpool is not so foggy a place as London, but it has a damper and less pleasant climate, without those varied attractions and substantial enjoyments which make London one of the most pleasant residences and most interesting of cities.

London fog is composed of soft-coal smoke, which, ascending from innumerable chimneys, is filtered in the upper skies, and then, mixed with vapor, is cast back upon the city by every change of wind. It is not unpleasant to the taste, and seems to be rather healthful than otherwise; but all the vapors which sail down the Gulf Stream, and which are not condensed on the Irish coast in the form of rain, collect about the mouth of the Mersey, so that the adjacent country is the best watered portion of all England, Cornwall possibly excepted. There is plenty of wealth in Liverpool, and all kinds of private entertainments, but in no other city of its size are there so few public entertainments, and the only interesting occupation that a stranger might find there, would be to watch the strange and curious characters in the lower classes, faces and figures that cannot be caricatured, emerging from cellar-ways or disappearing through side-doors. Go into an alehouse in the evening and, beside the pretty barmaid, who deserves consideration as much for her good behavior as for her looks, you will see plainly enough where Dickens obtained his
dramatis personae
for “Barnaby Rudge” and “The Old Curiosity Shop.” Either in Liverpool or in London you can see more grotesque comedy characters in a day, than you could meet with in a year in America. These poor creatures are pressed down, and squeezed out into what they are, under the superincumbent weight of an enormous leisure class.

Such was the environment in which Hawthorne was obliged to spend the ensuing four years. He soon, however, discovered a means to escape from the monotonous and labyrinthine streets of the city, by renting an imitation castle at Rock Ferry, — a very pretty place, much like Dobbs Ferry, on the Hudson, although the river is not so fine, — where his wife and children enjoyed fresh air, green grass, and all the sunshine attainable, and whence he could reach the consulate every morning by the Mersey boat. We find them located there before September 1.

Of the consulate itself, Hawthorne has given a minute pictorial description in “Our Old Home,” from which the following extract is especially pertinent to our present inquiry:

“The Consulate of the United States in my day, was located in Washington Buildings (a shabby and smoke-stained edifice of four stories high, thus illustriously named in honor of our national establishment), at the lower corner of Brunswick Street, contiguous to the Goree Arcade, and in the neighborhood of some of the oldest docks. This was by no means a polite or elegant portion of England's great commercial city, nor were the apartments of the American official so splendid as to indicate the assumption of much consular pomp on his part. A narrow and ill-lighted staircase gave access to an equally narrow and ill-lighted passage-way on the first floor, at the extremity of which, surmounting a door frame, appeared an exceedingly stiff pictorial representation of the Goose and Gridiron, according to the English idea of those ever-to-be-honored symbols. The staircase and passage-way were often thronged of a morning, with a set of beggarly and piratical-looking scoundrels (I do no wrong to our countrymen in styling them so, for not one in twenty was a genuine American), purporting to belong to our mercantile marine, and chiefly composed of Liverpool Blackballers, and the scum of every maritime nation on earth; such being the seamen by whose assistance we then disputed the navigation of the world with England. These specimens of a most unfortunate class of people were shipwrecked crews in quest of bed, board, and clothing, invalids asking permits for the hospital, bruised and bloody wretches complaining of ill-treatment by their officers, drunkards, desperadoes, vagabonds, and cheats, perplexingly intermingled with an uncertain proportion of reasonably honest men. All of them (save here and there a poor devil of a kidnapped landsman in his shore-going rags) wore red flannel shirts, in which they had sweltered or shivered throughout the voyage, and all required consular assistance in one form or another.”

The position of an American consul in a large foreign seaport, especially at Liverpool, is anything but a sinecure, and in fact requires a continual exercise of judgment much beyond the average duties of a foreign minister. The difficulty also of being continually obliged to distinguish between true and false applications for charity, especially when the false are greatly in excess of the true, and among a class of persons notably given to mendacious tricks, is one of the most unpleasant conditions in which a tender-hearted man can find himself. As curious studies in low life, the rascality of these nautical mendicants may often have been interesting, and even amusing, to Hawthorne, but as a steady pull they must have worn hard on his nerves, even though his experienced clerk served as a breakwater to a considerable portion. It has already been noticed that Hawthorne was a conscientious office-holder, and he never trusted to others any duties which he was able to attend to in person. Moreover, although he was a man of reserved manners, there was an exceptionally tender, sympathetic heart behind this impenetrable exterior, and it may be suspected that he relieved many instances of actual distress, which could not be brought within the government regulations. He may have suffered like the ghost in Dickens's “Haunted Man,” on account of those whom he could not assist. It is certain that he aged more, in appearance at least, during these four years, than at any similar period of his life.

It is no wonder, therefore, that, after a visit to the English lakes, the following summer, Hawthorne wrote to his friend, Henry Bright, from Liverpool:

“I have come back only for a day or two to this black and miserable hole. I do not mean to apply these two adjectives to my consulate, but to the whole of Liverpool.”

Yet it should be recollected that there were nearly a million of persons in Liverpool, who were obliged to spend their lives there, for good and evil fortune; and, as Emerson says, we can never think too lightly of our own difficulties.

Neither did Hawthorne find the news from America particularly interesting. On March 30, 1854, he wrote to Bridge:

“I like my office well enough, but my official duties and obligations are irksome to me beyond expression. Nevertheless, the emoluments will be a sufficient inducement to keep me here, though they are not above a quarter part what some people suppose them.

“It sickens me to look back to America. I am sick to death of the continual fuss and tumult and excitement and bad blood which we keep up about political topics. If it were not for my children, I should probably never return, but — after quitting office — should go to Italy, and live and die there. If Mrs. Bridge and you would go too, we might form a little colony amongst ourselves, and see our children grow up together. But it will never do to deprive them of their native land, which I hope will be a more comfortable and happy residence in their day than it has been in ours.”

[Footnote: J. Hawthorne, ii. 65.]

The last sentence in this ought to be printed in italics, for it is the essence of patriotism. The “fuss and tumult” in America were due, for the time being, to the apple of discord which Douglas had cast into the Senate, by his Kansas-Nebraska bill. Hawthorne was too far away to distinguish the full force and insidious character of that measure, but if he had been in Concord, we believe he would have recognized (as so many did who never had before) the imminent danger to the Union, from the repeated concessions to the slave power. After he had become disenthralled from his allegiance to party, we find him in his letters to Bridge, taking broad views on political subjects.

An event was soon to happen, well calculated to disenthrall him. The Congress of 1854, after passing the Kansas-Nebraska bill, resolved, in order to prove its democratic spirit, to economize in the representation of our government to foreign powers. On April 14, the good-hearted, theoretical O'Sullivan arrived in Liverpool, on his way to be minister to Portugal, and warned Hawthorne that there was a bill before Congress to reduce the consulate there to a salaried position. This was a terrible damper on Hawthorne's great expectations, and on April 17 he wrote again to Bridge, protesting against the change: [Footnote: Bridge, 135, 136.]

“I trust, in Heaven's mercy, that no change will be made as regards the emoluments of the Liverpool consulate — unless indeed a salary is to be given in addition to the fees, in which case I should receive it very thankfully. This, however, is not to be expected; and if Liverpool is touched at all, it will be to limit its emoluments by a fixed salary — which will render the office not worth any man's holding. It is impossible (especially for a man with a family and keeping any kind of an establishment) not to spend a vast deal of money here. The office, unfortunately, is regarded as one of great dignity, and puts the holder on a level with the highest society, and compels him to associate on equal terms with men who spend more than my whole income on the mere entertainments and other trimmings and embroidery of their lives. Then I feel bound to exercise some hospitality towards my own countrymen. I keep out of society as much as I decently can, and really practice as stern an economy as I ever did in my life; but, nevertheless, I have spent many thousands of dollars in the few months of my residence here, and cannot reasonably hope to spend less than six thousand per annum, even after all the expenditure of setting up an establishment is defrayed.”