Hawthorne in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life,Drawn from Recollections,Interviews, and Memoirs by Family,Frie

[ Journal Thoughts on Hawthorne, 1838– 1864]

[Journal Thoughts on Hawthorne, 1838–1864] Ralph Waldo Emerson If pressed for the truth, the authors of many of the narratives collected in this volume would likely confess that the person they most often came to see in Concord was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), not Hawthorne—and certainly not Bronson Alcott, Ellery Channing, or Thoreau. Yet, even if Emerson was not the primary object of their visit, as the acknowledged leader of the Transcendentalist movement from the 1830s onward, and as Concord’s only true international celebrity from the 1840s until his death, he cast a long and enduring shadow over the presence and reputations of all who gathered in the town during the mid-nineteenth century. It is difficult to imagine two persons more different in temperament and outlook than Emerson and Hawthorne. A member of the latest generation of descendants of New England’s first settlers who for more than two centuries had supplied clergymen for her most distinguished pulpits, a public intellectual who transformed the speaker’s platform into a pulpit where he preached a new gospel of the individual’s personal relation to nature and the divine and of social reform to America’s post-Revolution generations, and sufficiently cosmopolitan to be at ease in large or small companies, by lineage and personal disposition Emerson was everything that Hawthorne was not—or, at least, that Hawthorne chose not to be. Hawthorne was compared to Emerson more often than to any other of his contemporaries; even the quality of his character and personality and the degree of his worldly success were measured against Emerson’s. However one assesses the justice of the comparisons, there is little doubt that Hawthorne always suffered by them. More painful yet, on reading the journals of both men, it is apparent that they were each conscious of the public’s inclination to “size them up” in this way. In an uncharacteristic act of apologetic self-effacement, Emerson admitted as much to Sophia after Hawthorne’s death and in the second of two journal passages printed below. Writing to Sophia on 11 July 1864, he said, “I have had my own pain in the loss of your husband. He was always a mine of hope to me, and I promised myself a rich future in achieving at some day, when we should both be less engaged to tyrannical studies & habitudes, an unreserved intercourse with him. I thought I could well wait his time & mine for what was so well worth [30] [30] [30] XZ waiting” (Letters RWE, 9:147–48). This letter echoes the sentiment Emerson had earlier expressed in his journal, on the day after he served as a pallbearer at Hawthorne’s funeral; there, confessing Hawthorne’s death “a surprise & disappointment,” he wrote that it deprived both men of the “happiness” to one day “conquer a friendship” (JMN, 15:59–60). Hawthorne was brought to Emerson’s attention by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody , who in 1837–1838 claimed the obscure writer from Salem and the ecstatic poet Jones Very as her latest discoveries. In June 1838, she gave Emerson a copy of “Foot-prints on the Sea-shore,” which had appeared in January in the Democratic Review; after reading it, he quipped in his journal, “E. P. P. brought me yesterday Hawthorne’s Footprints. . . . I complained that there was no inside to it. Alcott & he together would make a man” (JMN, 7:21). As disparaging of Hawthorne’s fiction as Hawthorne was of Emersonian idealism with its Platonic and Swedenborgian tinges, Emerson never fully appreciated Hawthorne’s talent. In 1839, after commenting that it was “no easy matter to write a dialogue,” he linked Hawthorne to Cooper and Dickens as examples of writers who definitely could not (JMN, 7:242). Indeed, there is always an edge to Emerson’s judgments on Hawthorne’s literary ability. For instance, after noting in 1842 that Hawthorne’s growing “reputation as a writer is a very pleasing fact,” Emerson says that “this is a tribute to the man,” “because his writing is not good for anything” ( JMN, 7:465). By 1846, he appears completely out of patience with Hawthorne as an imaginative artist, remarking that he “invites his readers too much into his study, opens the process before them. As if the confectioner should say to his customers[,] Now let us make the cake” ( JMN, 9:405). And as harsh as he was about Hawthorne’s writings, Emerson could be harsher yet about Hawthorne...