P.'S CORRESPONDENCE
From "Mosses From An Old
Manse"
By
Nathaniel Hawthorne
My unfortunate friend P. has lost the thread of his life by the interposition of long intervals of partially disordered reason. The past and present are jumbled together in his mind in a manner often productive of curious results, and which will be better understood after the perusal of the following letter than from any description that I could give. The poor fellow, without once stirring from the little whitewashed, iron-grated room to which he alludes in his first paragraph, is nevertheless a great traveller, and meets in his wanderings a variety of personages who have long ceased to be visible to any eye save his own. In my opinion, all this is not so much a delusion as a partly wilful and partly involuntary sport of the imagination, to which his disease has imparted such morbid energy that he beholds these spectral scenes and characters with no less distinctness than a play upon the stage, and with somewhat more of illusive credence. Many of his letters are in my possession, some based upon the same vagary as the present one, and others upon hypotheses not a whit short of it in absurdity. The whole form a series of correspondence, which, should fate seasonably remove my poor friend from what is to him a world of moonshine, I promise myself a pious pleasure in editing for the public eye. P. had always a hankering after literary reputation, and has made more than one unsuccessful effort to achieve it. It would not be a little odd, if, after missing his object while seeking it by the light of reason, he should prove to have stumbled upon it in his misty excursions beyond the limits of sanity.
MY DEAR FRIEND: Old associations cling to the mind with astonishing tenacity. Daily custom grows up about us like a stone wall, and consolidates itself into almost as material an entity as mankind's strongest architecture. It is sometimes a serious question with me whether ideas be not really visible and tangible, and endowed with all the other qualities of matter. Sitting as I do at this moment in my hired apartment, writing beside the hearth, over which hangs a print of Queen Victoria, listening to the muffled roar of the world's metropolis, and with a window at but five paces distant, through which, whenever I please, I can gaze out on actual London,--with all this positive certainty as to my whereabouts, what kind of notion, do you think, is just now perplexing my brain? Why,--would you believe it?--that all this time I am still an inhabitant of that wearisome little chamber,--that whitewashed little chamber,--that little chamber with its one small window, across which, from some inscrutable reason of taste or convenience, my landlord had placed a row of iron bars,--that same little chamber, in short, whither your kindness has so often brought you to visit me! Will no length of time or breadth of space enfranchise me from that unlovely abode? I travel; but it seems to be like the snail, with my house upon my head. Ah, well! I am verging, I suppose, on that period of life when present scenes and events make but feeble impressions in comparison with those of yore; so that I must reconcile myself to be more and more the prisoner of Memory, who merely lets me hop about a little with her chain around my leg.
My letters of introduction have been of the utmost service, enabling me to make the acquaintance of several distinguished characters who, until now, have seemed as remote from the sphere of my personal intercourse as the wits of Queen Anne's time or Ben Jenson's compotators at the Mermaid. One of the first of which I availed myself was the letter to Lord Byron. I found his lordship looking much older than I had anticipated, although, considering his former irregularities of life and the various wear and tear of his constitution, not older than a man on the verge of sixty reasonably may look. But I had invested his earthly frame, in my imagination, with the poet's spiritual immortality. He wears a brown wig, very luxuriantly curled, and extending down over his forehead. The expression of his eyes is concealed by spectacles. His early tendency to obesity having increased, Lord Byron is now enormously fat,--so fat as to give the impression of a person quite overladen with his own flesh, and without sufficient vigor to diffuse his personal life through the great mass of corporeal substance which weighs upon him so cruelly. You gaze at the mortal heap; and, while it fills your eye with what purports to be Byron, you murmur within yourself, "For Heaven's sake, where is he?" Were I disposed to be caustic, I might consider this mass of earthly matter as the symbol, in a material shape, of those evil habits and carnal vices which unspiritualize man's nature and clog up his avenues of communication with the better life. But this would be too harsh; and, besides, Lord Byron's morals have been improving while his outward man has swollen to such unconscionable circumference. Would that he were leaner; for, though he did me the honor to present his hand, yet it was so puffed out with alien substance that I could not feel as if I had touched the hand that wrote Childe Harold.
On my entrance his lordship apologized for not rising to receive me, on the sufficient plea that the gout for several years past had taken up its constant residence in his right foot, which accordingly was swathed in many rolls of flannel and deposited upon a cushion. The other foot was hidden in the drapery of his chair. Do you recollect whether Byron's right or left foot was the deformed one.
The noble poet's reconciliation with Lady Byron is now, as
you are aware, of ten years' standing; nor does it exhibit, I am assured, any
symptom of breach or fracture. They are said
to be, if not a happy, at least a contented, or at all events a quiet couple,
descending the slope of life with that tolerable degree of mutual support which
will enable them to come easily and comfortably to the bottom. It is pleasant to reflect how entirely the
poet has redeemed his youthful errors in this particular. Her ladyship's influence, it rejoices me to
add, has been productive of the happiest results upon Lord Byron in a religious
point of view. He now combines the most
rigid tenets of Methodism with the ultra doctrines of the Puseyites; the former
being perhaps due to the convictions wrought upon his mind by his noble
consort, while the latter are the embroidery and picturesque illumination
demanded by his imaginative character. Much of whatever expenditure his
increasing habits of thrift continue to allow him is bestowed in the reparation
or beautifying of places of worship; and this nobleman, whose name was once
considered a synonyme of the foul fiend, is now all but canonized as a saint in
many pulpits of the metropolis and elsewhere.
In politics, Lord Byron is an uncompromising conservative, and loses no
opportunity, whether in the House of Lords or in private circles, of denouncing
and repudiating the mischievous and anarchical notions of his earlier day. Nor does he fail to visit similar sins in
other people with the sincerest vengeance which his somewhat blunted pen is
capable of inflicting. Southey and he are on the most intimate terms. You are aware that, some little time before the
death of
I failed not, as you may suppose, in the course of conversation with Lord Byron, to pay the weed of homage due to a mighty poet, by allusions to passages in Childe Harold, and Manfred, and Don Juan, which have made so large a portion of the music of my life. My words, whether apt or otherwise, were at least warm with the enthusiasm of one worthy to discourse of immortal poesy. It was evident, however, that they did not go precisely to the right spot. I could perceive that there was some mistake or other, and was not a little angry with myself, and ashamed of my abortive attempt to throw back, from my own heart to the gifted author's ear, the echo of those strains that have resounded throughout the world. But by and by the secret peeped quietly out. Byron,--I have the information from his own lips, so that you need not hesitate to repeat it in literary circles,--Byron is preparing a new edition of his complete works, carefully corrected, expurgated, and amended, in accordance with his present creed of taste, morals, politics, and religion. It so happened that the very passages of highest inspiration to which I had alluded were among the condemned and rejected rubbish which it is his purpose to cast into the gulf of oblivion. To whisper you the truth, it appears to me that his passions having burned out, the extinction of their vivid and riotous flame has deprived Lord Byron of the illumination by which he not merely wrote, but was enabled to feel and comprehend what he had written. Positively he no longer understands his own poetry.
This became very apparent on his favoring me so far as to
read a few specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious, whatever
disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever morbidly
melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails settled constitutions
of government or systems of society, whatever could wound the sensibility of
any mortal, except a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter, has been
unrelentingly blotted out, and its place supplied by unexceptionable verses in
his lordship's later style. You may
judge how much of the poem remains as hitherto published. The result is not so
good as might be wished; in plain terms, it is a very sad affair indeed; for,
though the torches kindled in Tophet have been extinguished, they leave an
abominably ill odor, and are succeeded by no glimpses of hallowed fire. It is to be hoped, nevertheless, that this
attempt on Lord Byron's part to atone for his youthful errors will at length
induce the Dean of Westminster, or whatever churchman is concerned, to allow
Thorwaldsen's statue of the poet its due niche in the grand old Abbey. His bones, you know, when brought from
What a vile slip of the pen was that! How absurd in me to talk about burying the bones of Byron, who, I have just seen alive, and incased in a big, round bulk of flesh! But, to say the truth, a prodigiously fat man always impresses me as a kind of hobgoblin; in the very extravagance of his mortal system I find something akin to the immateriality of a ghost. And then that ridiculous old story darted into my mind, how that Byron died of fever at Missolonghi, above twenty years ago. More and more I recognize that we dwell in a world of shadows; and, for my part, I hold it hardly worth the trouble to attempt a distinction between shadows in the mind and shadows out of it. If there be any difference, the former are rather the more substantial.
Only think of my good fortune! The venerable Robert Burns--now, if I mistake
not, in his eighty-seventh year--happens to be making a visit to
Poh! Nonsense! What am I thinking of? How should Burns have been embalmed in biography when he is still a hearty old man?
The figure of the bard is tall and in the highest degree reverend, nor the less so that it is much bent by the burden of time. His white hair floats like a snowdrift around his face, in which are seen the furrows of intellect and passion, like the channels of headlong torrents that have foamed themselves away. The old gentleman is in excellent preservation, considering his time of life. He has that crickety sort of liveliness,--I mean the cricket's humor of chirping for any cause or none,--which is perhaps the most favorable mood that can befall extreme old age. Our pride forbids us to desire it for ourselves, although we perceive it to be a beneficence of nature in the case of others. I was surprised to find it in Burns. It seems as if his ardent heart and brilliant imagination had both burned down to the last embers, leaving only a little flickering flame in one corner, which keeps dancing upward and laughing all by itself. He is no longer capable of pathos. At the request of Allan Cunningham, he attempted to sing his own song to Mary in Heaven; but it was evident that the feeling of those verses, so profoundly true and so simply expressed, was entirely beyond the scope of his present sensibilities; and, when a touch of it did partially awaken him, the tears immediately gushed into his eyes and his voice broke into a tremulous cackle. And yet he but indistinctly knew wherefore he was weeping. Ah, he must not think again of Mary in Heaven until he shake off the dull impediment of time and ascend to meet her there.
Burns then began to repeat Tan O'Shanter; but was so tickled with its wit and humor--of which, however, I suspect he had but a traditionary sense--that he soon burst into a fit of chirruping laughter, succeeded by a cough, which brought this not very agreeable exhibition to a close. On the whole, I would rather not have witnessed it. It is a satisfactory idea, however, that the last forty years of the peasant poet's life have been passed in competence and perfect comfort. Having been cured of his bardic improvidence for many a day past, and grown as attentive to the main chance as a canny Scotsman should be, he is now considered to he quite well off as to pecuniary circumstances. This, I suppose, is worth having lived so long for.
I took occasion to inquire of some of the countrymen of Burns in regard to the health of Sir Walter Scott. His condition, I am sorry to say, remains the same as for ten years past; it is that of a hopeless paralytic, palsied not more in body than in those nobler attributes of which the body is the instrument. And thus he vegetates from day to day and from year to year at that splendid fantasy of Abbotsford, which grew out of his brain, and became a symbol of the great romancer's tastes, feelings, studies, prejudices, and modes of intellect. Whether in verse, prose, or architecture, he could achieve but one thing, although that one in infinite variety. There he reclines, on a couch in his library, and is said to spend whole hours of every day in dictating tales to an amanuensis,--to an imaginary amanuensis; for it is not deemed worth any one's trouble now to take down what flows from that once brilliant fancy, every image of which was formerly worth gold and capable of being coined. Yet Cunningham, who has lately seen him, assures me that there is now and then a touch of the genius,--a striking combination of incident, or a picturesque trait of character, such as no other man alive could have bit off,--a glimmer from that ruined mind, as if the sun had suddenly flashed on a half-rusted helmet in the gloom of an ancient ball. But the plots of these romances become inextricably confused; the characters melt into one another; and the tale loses itself like the course of a stream flowing through muddy and marshy ground.
For my part, I can hardly regret that Sir Walter Scott had lost his consciousness of outward things before his works went out of vogue. It was good that he should forget his fame rather than that fame should first have forgotten him. Were he still a writer, and as brilliant a one as ever, he could no longer maintain anything like the same position in literature. The world, nowadays, requires a more earnest purpose, a deeper moral, and a closer and homelier truth than he was qualified to supply it with. Yet who can be to the present generation even what Scott has been to the past? I had expectations from a young man,--one Dickens,--who published a few magazine articles, very rich in humor, and not without symptoms of genuine pathos; but the poor fellow died shortly after commencing an odd series of sketches, entitled, I think, the Pickwick Papers. Not impossibly the world has lost more than it dreams of by the untimley death of this Mr. Dickens.
Whom do you think I met in
Death and fury! Ha,
villain, how came you hither? Avaunt! or I fling my inkstand at your head. Tush, tusk; it is all a mistake. Pray, my
dear friend, pardon this little outbreak.
The fact is, the mention of those two policemen, and their custody of
Bonaparte, had called up the idea of that odious wretch--you remember him
well--who was pleased to take such gratuitous and impertinent care of my person
before I quitted
You will be anxious to hear of Shelley. I need not say, what is known to all the world, that this celebrated poet has for many years past been reconciled to the Church of England. In his more recent works he has applied his fine powers to the vindication of the Christian faith, with an especial view to that particular development. Latterly, as you may not have heard, he has taken orders, and been inducted to a small country living in the gift of the Lord Chancellor. Just now, luckily for me, he has come to the metropolis to superintend the publication of a volume of discourses treating of the poetico-philosophical proofs of Christianity on the basis of the Thirty-nine Articles. On my first introduction I felt no little embarrassment as to the manner of combining what I had to say to the author of _Queen Mali_, the _Revolt of Islam_, and _Prometheus Unbound_ with such acknowledgments as might be acceptable to a Christian minister and zealous upholder of the Established Church. But Shelley soon placed me at my ease. Standing where he now does, and reviewing all his successive productions from a higher point, he assures me that there is a harmony, an order, a regular procession, which enables him to lay his hand upon any one of the earlier poems and say, "This is my work," with precisely the same complacency of conscience wherewithal he contemplates the volume of discourses above mentioned. They are like the successive steps of a staircase, the lowest of which, in the depth of chaos, is as essential to the support of the whole as the highest and final one resting upon the threshold of the heavens. I felt half inclined to ask him what would have been his fate had he perished on the lower steps of his staircase, instead of building his way aloft into the celestial brightness.
How all this may be I neither pretend to understand nor
greatly care, so long as Shelley has really climbed, as it seems he has, from a
lower region to a loftier one. Without
touching upon their religious merits, I consider the productions of his
maturity superior, as poems, to those of his youth. They are warmer with human love, which has
served as an interpreter between his mind and the multitude. The author has learned to dip his pen oftener
into his heart, and has thereby avoided the faults into which a too exclusive
use of fancy and intellect are wont to betray him. Formerly his page was often
little other than a concrete arrangement of crystallizations, or even of
icicles, as cold as they were brilliant.
Now you take it to your heart, and are conscious of a heart-warmth
responsive to your own. In his private
character Shelley can hardly have grown more gentle, kind, and affectionate
than his friends always represented him to be up to that disastrous night when
he was drowned in the
Before quitting the subject, I may mention that Dr. Reginald
Heber, heretofore Bishop of
Coleridge has at last finished his poem of Christabel. It will be issued entire by old John Murray in the course of the present publishing season. The poet, I hear, is visited with a troublesome affection of the tongue, which has put a period, or some lesser stop, to the life-long discourse that has hitherto been flowing from his lips. He will not survive it above a month, unless his accumulation of ideas be sluiced off in some other way. Wordsworth died only a week or two ago. Heaven rest his soul, and grant that he may not have completed _The Excursion_! Methinks I am sick of everything he wrote, except his _Laodamia_. It is very sad, this inconstancy of the mind to the poets whom it once worshipped. Southey is as hale as ever, and writes with his usual diligence. Old Gifford is still alive, in the extremity of age, and with most pitiable decay of what little sharp and narrow intellect the Devil had gifted him withal. One hates to allow such a man the privilege of growing old and infirm. It takes away our speculative license of kicking him.
Keats? No; I have not seen him except across a crowded street, with coaches, drays, horsemen, cabs, omnibuses, foot-passengers, and divers other sensual obstructions intervening betwixt his small and slender figure and my eager glance. I would fain have met him on the sea-shore, or beneath a natural arch of forest trees, or the Gothic arch of an old cathedral, or among Grecian ruins, or at a glimmering fireside on the verge of evening, or at the twilight entrance of a cave, into the dreamy depths of which he would have led me by the hand; anywhere, in short, save at Temple Bar, where his presence was blotted out by the porter-swollen bulks of these gross Englishmen. I stood and watched him fading away, fading away along the pavement, and could hardly tell whether he were an actual man or a thought that had slipped out of my mind and clothed itself in human form and habiliments merely to beguile me. At one moment he put his handkerchief to his lips, and withdrew it, I am almost certain, stained with blood. You never saw anything so fragile as his person. The truth is, Keats has all his life felt the effects of that terrible bleeding at the lungs caused by the article on his Endymion in the Quarterly Review, and which so nearly brought him to the grave. Ever since he has glided about the world like a ghost, sighing a melancholy tone in the ear of here and there a friend, but never sending forth his voice to greet the multitude. I can hardly think him a great poet. The burden of a mighty genius would never have been imposed upon shoulders so physically frail and a spirit so infirmly sensitive. Great poets should have iron sinews.
Yet Keats, though for so many years he has given nothing to
the world, is understood to have devoted himself to the composition of an epic
poem. Some passages of it have been
communicated to the inner circle of his admirers, and impressed them as the
loftiest strains that have been audible on earth since
To this great work Keats is said to have brought so deep and tender a spirit of humanity that the poem has all the sweet and warm interest of a village tale no less than the grandeur which befits so high a theme. Such, at least, is the perhaps partial representation of his friends; for I have not read or heard even a single line of the performance in question. Keats, I am told, withholds it from the press, under an idea that the age has not enough of spiritual insight to receive it worthily. I do not like this distrust; it makes me distrust the poet. The universe is waiting to respond to the highest word that the best child of time and immortality can utter. If it refuse to listen, it is because he mumbles and stammers, or discourses things unseasonable and foreign to the purpose.
I visited the House of Lords the other day to hear Canning, who, you know, is now a peer, with I forget what title. He disappointed me. Time blunts both point and edge, and does great mischief to men of his order of intellect. Then I stepped into the lower House and listened to a few words from Cobbett, who looked as earthy as a real clodhopper, or rather as if he had lain a dozen years beneath the clods. The men whom I meet nowadays often impress me thus; probably because my spirits are not very good, and lead me to think much about graves, with the long grass upon them, and weather-worn epitaphs, and dry bones of people who made noise enough in their day, but now can only clatter, clatter, clatter, when the sexton's spade disturbs them. Were it only possible to find out who are alive and who dead, it would contribute infinitely to my peace of mind. Every day of my life somebody comes and stares me in the face whom I had quietly blotted out of the tablet of living men, and trusted nevermore to be pestered with the sight or sound of him. For instance, going to Drury Lane Theatre a few evenings since, up rose before me, in the ghost of Hamlet's father, the bodily presence of the elder Kean, who did die, or ought to have died, in some drunken fit or other, so long ago that his fame is scarcely traditionary now. His powers are quite gone; he was rather the ghost of himself than the ghost of the Danish king.
In the stage-box sat several elderly and decrepit people,
and among them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a
profile--for I did not see her front face--that stamped itself into my brain as
a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic
gesture with which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs.
Siddons. Her brother, John Kemble, sat behind,--a brokendown
figure, but still with a kingly majesty about him. In lieu of all former achievements, Nature
enables him to look the part of Lear far better than in the meridian of his
genius. Charles Matthews was likewise
there; but a paralytic affection has distorted his once mobile countenance into
a most disagreeable one-sidedness, from which he could no more wrench it into
proper form than he could rearrange the face of the great globe itself. It
looks as if, for the joke's sake, the poor man had twisted his features into an
expression at once the most ludicrous and horrible that he could contrive, and
at that very moment, as a judgment for making himself so hideous, an avenging
What is there new in the literary way on your side of the
water? Nothing of the kind has come under any inspection, except a volume of
poems published above a year ago by Dr. Channing. I did not before know that this eminent
writer is a poet; nor does the volume alluded to exhibit any of the
characteristics of the author's mind as displayed in his prose works; although
some of the poems have a richness that is not merely of the surface, but glows
still the brighter the deeper and more faithfully you look into then. They seem carelessly wrought, however, like
those rings and ornaments of the very purest gold, but of rude, native
manufacture, which are found among the gold-dust from
And yet there is no telling: it may be as well that they have died. I was myself a young man of promise. O shattered brain, O broken spirit, where is the fulfilment of that promise? The sad truth is, that, when fate would gently disappoint the world, it takes away the hopefulest mortals in their youth; when it would laugh the world's hopes to scorn, it lets them live. Let me die upon this apothegm, for I shall never make a truer one.
What a strange substance is the human brain! Or rather,--for there is no need of generalizing the remark,--what an odd brain is mine! Would you believe it? Daily and nightly there come scraps of poetry humming in my intellectual ear--some as airy as birdnotes, and some as delicately neat as parlor-music, and a few as grand as organ-peals--that seem just such verses as those departed poets would have written had not an inexorable destiny snatched them from their inkstands. They visit me in spirit, perhaps desiring to engage my services as the amanuensis of their posthumous productions, and thus secure the endless renown that they have forfeited by going hence too early. But I have my own business to attend to; and besides, a medical gentleman, who interests himself in some little ailments of mine, advises me not to make too free use of pen and ink. There are clerks enough out of employment who would be glad of such a job.
Good by! Are you
alive or dead? and what are you about? Still scribbling for the Democratic? And do those infernal compositors and
proof-readers misprint your unfortunate productions as vilely as ever? It is
too bad. Let every man manufacture his own
nonsense, say I. Expect me home soon,
and--to whisper you a secret--in company with the poet Campbell, who purposes
to visit
Your true friend, P.
P. S.--Pray present my most respectful regards to our venerable and revered friend Mr. Brockden Brown.
It gratifies me to learn that a complete edition of his
works, in a double-columned octavo volume, is shortly to issue from the press
at
THE END