CHAPTER VI.

THE OLD MANSE.

IN the preceding chapters little space has been given to discussion of the merely literary aspect and details of Hawthorne's life. A good deal might have been said about his early successes and disappointments in this direction: how hard he worked for publishers who paid him only with promises; how the "Athenæum" and Mr. Longfellow praised him; how Poe criticised him; how the "Church Review" attacked him; and more to the same effect, with the writer's meditations and comments thereupon. But such matters appertain less to the biographer than to the bibliographer. They give no solidity or form to our conception of the man. Hawthorne's works are published to the world, and any one may read them, and derive from them whatever literary or moral culture he may be susceptible of. But any attempt to make the works throw light upon their author is certain to miscarry, unless the student be previously impregnated with a very distinct and unmistakable conception of that author's human and natural (as distinct from his merely imaginative and artistic) personality. The books may add depth

and minuteness to this conception, when once it has been attained, but they cannot be depended on to create it beforehand. Accordingly, it is the biographer's business, so far as his abilities and materials allow, to confine himself to putting the reader in possession of this human aspect of his subject, and to let the rest take care, in great measure, of itself. In other words, he must do for the reader only so much as the reader cannot do for himself. To do more would be superfluous, if not presumptuous. Few men, who have made literature the business of their lives, have been less dependent than Hawthorne upon literature for a character. If he had never written a line, he would still have possessed, as a human being, scarcely less interest and importance than he does now. Those who were most intimate with him not only found in him all the promise of his works, but they found enough more to put the works quite in the background. His literary phase seemed a phase only, and not the largest or most characteristic. In the same way, when he was a consul at Liverpool, nobody could have been a better consul than he; but when you came into his presence, the consul was lost sight of, and the man shone out. Some men are swallowed up by their profession, so that nothing is left of them but the profession in human form. But, for men like Hawthorne, the profession is but a means of activity; they use it, and are not used by it. Hawthorne's son remembers that, twenty or thirty years ago, it seemed to him rather a regrettable thing that