The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne Part 24

If public opinion has any value, this pa.s.sage concerning Margaret Fuller's marriage ought not to have been published; but what can Margaret Fuller's friends and admirers expect? Do they think that a young American woman can go to a foreign country, and live with a foreign gentleman, in defiance of the customs of modern society, without subjecting herself to the severest criticism? It is true that she married Count d'Ossoli before her child was born, and her friends, who were certainly an enlightened cla.s.s, always believed that she acted throughout from the most honorable motives (my own opinion is, that she acted in imitation of Goethe), but how can they expect the great ma.s.s of mankind to think so? Hawthorne had a right to his opinion, as well as Emerson and Channing, and although it was certainly not a very charitable opinion, we cannot doubt that it was an honest one. In regard to the marriage tie, Hawthorne was always strict and conservative.

This is the climax of the _Atlantic_ critique, and its anti-climax is an excoriation of Hawthorne's son for neglecting to do equal and exact justice to James T. Fields. This truly is a grievous accusation. Fields was Hawthorne's publisher and would seem to have taken a personal and friendly interest in him besides, but we cannot look on it as a wholly unselfish interest. It was not like Hillard's, Pierce's, and Bridge's interest in Hawthorne. If Fields had not been his publisher, it is not probable that Hawthorne would have made his acquaintance; and if his son has not enlarged on Fields's good offices in bringing "The Scarlet Letter" before the public, there is an excellent reason for it, in the fact that Fields had already done so for himself in his "Yesterdays with Authors." That Fields's name should have been omitted in the index to "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife," may have been an oversight; but, at all events, it is too microscopic a matter to deserve consideration in a first-cla.s.s review.

Are we become such babies, that it is no longer possible for a writer to tell the plain, ostensible truth concerning human nature, without having a storm raised about his head for it? George P. Bradford and Martin F.

Tupper are similar instances, and like Boswell have suffered the penalty which accrues to men of small stature for a.s.sociating with giants.

APPENDIX C

The great poets and other writers of all nations whom I conceive to be superior to Hawthorne, may be found in the following list: Homer, aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Pindar, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Theocritus, Plutarch; Horace, Virgil, Cicero, Tacitus; Dante, Ta.s.so, Petrarch; Cervantes, Calderon, Camoens; Moliere, Racine, Descartes, Voltaire; Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Kant; Swedenborg; Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton, and perhaps Burns and Byron; Alexander Hamilton, Napoleon.

These also may be placed more on an equality with Hawthorne, although there will of course always be wide differences of opinion on that point: Hesiod, Herodotus, Menander, Aristophases; Livy, Caesar, Lucretius, Juvenal; Ariosto, Macchiavelli, Manzoni, Lope de Vega, Buthas Pato; Corneille, Pascal, Rousseau; Wieland, Klopstock, Heine, Auerbach; Spenser, Ben Jonson, Fletcher, Fielding, Pope, Scott, Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, Carlyle, Browning, Tennyson, Froude; Webster, Emerson, Wa.s.son.

Sappho, Bion, Moschus, and Cleanthes were certainly poets of a high order, but only some fragments of their poetry have survived. Gottfried of Stra.s.sburg, the Minnesinger, might be included, and some of the finest English poetry was written by unknown geniuses of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Ballads like "Chevy Chace" and the "Child of Elle" deserve a high place in the rank of poetry; and the German "Reineke Fuchs" is in its way without a rival. There may be other French, German, and Spanish writers of exceptional excellence with whom I am unacquainted, but I do not feel that any French or German novelists of the last century ought to be placed on a level with Hawthorne--only excepting Auerbach. Victor Hugo is grandiloquent, and the others all have some serious fault or limitation. I suppose that not one in ten of Emerson's readers has ever heard of Wa.s.son, but he was the better prose writer of the two, and little inferior as a poet. More elevated he could not be, but more profound, just, logical and humane--that is, more like Hawthorne. Emerson could not have filled his place on the _Atlantic Monthly_ and the _North American Review_.