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

[ On First Meeting Hawthorne in America, 1852]

[59] [59] [On First Meeting Hawthorne in America, 1852] [Henry Arthur Bright] Hawthorne credited Henry Arthur Bright (1830–1884), a businessman and man of letters from Liverpool, and Francis Bennoch as the two best friends he made in England. The year before Hawthorne’s appointment as U.S. consul to Liverpool and Manchester, Bright, accompanied by his Cambridge (UK) friend, Thomas Burder, spent five months in America, in part as a representative of Gibbs, Bright, and Company, his father’s shipping firm, but mostly as a tourist . Bright’s travels took him up and down the eastern seaboard, west to the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and north to Quebec and Montreal. As he would say for the rest of his life—but especially after renewing acquaintances with him in England in 1853—the highpoint of his travels was the opportunity to meet Hawthorne in Concord. Armed with a letter of introduction to Hawthorne from Longfellow, Bright and his companion first called on Emerson, who on Saturday , 25 September 1852 walked them over to the Wayside, where they met Hawthorne. The amount of attention Bright devotes to Emerson throughout his travel diary suggests that he, rather than Hawthorne, had been the real object of his visit to Concord. As Bright’s narrative unfolds, it seems clear that Longfellow and Thomas Gold Appleton had forewarned him about some of the characters he would meet there, especially Bronson Alcott. Here, Alcott is referred to as “Emerson’s ‘Skimpole Plato’” (397), a label—based on a character in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House who hides his innate selfishness under the guise of childishness—that was given to him by Longfellow’s wife, Fanny. As characterized by Bright, Hawthorne’s embarrassment over his exchange with Fredrika Bremer was undoubtedly genuine, not only because the exchange had obviously become a subject of local gossip, but also because the gossip was true. In the selection that follows next in this volume, Bremer reports her frustration at being unable to engage Hawthorne in a meaningful conversation when she called on him in Lenox in September 1850. On thursday [23 september 1852] at twelve we three started for Concord to see Emerson and Hawthorne. We got there in about an hour. It was a beautiful day, and I felt in particular good spirits and health. It was a bright [59] XZ hawthorne in his own time [60] early Autumn day, a light fresh wind played among the trees and blew away a leaf here and there, and reddened the tints on the maples and the oaks, as we walked along the broad lanes of Concord. Like an English village is the Concord of Massachusetts and of Emerson. Huge trees stand singly out between the footpath and the road, and most of all the drooping elms bend over us as we pass. White houses with gardens before them are on each side of the way. A little girl with straw hat and clever face, and school book under her arm is standing on our track, and we ask her where Emerson is living. “Watch,” she replied, “keep down the road and past the meeting house, and when you’ve turned to the right you’ll see his house amidst a grove of pines.” There it is! the door is standing wide open, and the girl who answers our bell shows us into his study. The study is surrounded with well-filled and badly arranged book-cases, the table is covered with well read and badly bound books. Over the chimney-piece is a picture of the Three Fates, in an open drawer is a collection of ripening pears. But here is Emerson;—a tall, thin, angular figure, with quiet gentlemanly manner, unaffected look and pleasant voice. He’s by no means awful or incomprehensible . . . . We walked in his garden with him; he is interested in pear-trees and pumpkins,and told us of one of the early settlers who asserted that “in America God Almighty feeds His people with pumpkins.” He took us to see Hawthorne, and as we went along, talked pleasantly all the way. Hawthorne’s house is an old one—100 years old—and a hill rises pleasantly behind it. Hawthorne leads an almost hermit life; he’s a strange man, so shy and retiring that he is rarely seen, and hardly speaks when he is seen. He is so gentle and mild that you feel as if speaking to a girl, said Emerson , when speaking...