A Chat about New Books [pp. 411-419]

A CHAT ABOUT NEW BOOKS.
I.Dec.
rately dropped from his former height to adorn police reports
with patches of incongruous writing.
The Biography is charming. Mrs. Hawthorne's letters to her
son are delightfully womanly in the best sense. She evidently
had the art of letter-writing in perfection. The second volume
contains the Lisbon letters —Mrs. Hhwthorne having spent some
time there while her husband was at his post in England —which
are graphic descriptions of court-life, marked by shrewdness, good
taste, and sympathy. The Biography, which is very honestly,
ingenuously, and lovingly written, is an exception to the.biographies of men of letters. It leaves with us the most exalted
impressions of Hawthorne. It is remarkable that his spirit, so
sensitive, was not overbalanced by transient enthusiasm and
turmoil around him. He was self-poised, but not self-centred.
And his letters during the war are admirable examples of this.
He was patriotic, but he had nothing of the violence of the
times which allowed no man a right to his opinions as to the
methods of the government:
"He did not hope for the preservation of the Union; because if it came
peacefully it would sooner or later involve the extension of slavery over
the United States, over the Northern States, and if by war it seemed to
him that it would be only superficial and temporary. The essence of all
true union being mutual good-will, it would follow that compulsion could
effect nothing worth having. At the same time the prospect of the dissolution of that mighty nation which had embodied the best hopes of mankind was a deep pain to him. He regarded slavery as an evil, and would
have made any personal sacrifice to be rid of it as an element in the
national existence; but to maintain that we were ready to imperil our life
merely out of regard for the liberation of the negroes, was, in his opinion,
to utter sentimental nonsense.'The best reason that he could give for
going to war was that the arrogance of the slave-holders would otherwise
reach a pitch that the republic in effect would be transformed into an.
oligarchy, or possibly something worse."
The Saturday Revziew, in its first notice of The Marble Faun,
interpreted, at least with apparent truth, Hawthorne's position
towards the church: "Mr. Hawthorne seems greatly attracted
by Catholicism. No one could fall more entirely than Mr. Hawthorne into the modern fashion of asking, not whether a religion
is true, but whether it is suitable to a particular individual.
His Protestantism seems to have been greatly indebted to the
theory in which he finally rested-that the papal system is dying
out." The Saturday Reviewer was inclined to find fault with Hawthorne's admiration for eali lt o the spirituality of the church, as well as
with his inability to make allowances for some of the defects in'
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