Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, September 6, 1864

Home, 6 September, 1864.

I have just read your paper on Hawthorne, and am greatly pleased with it. Your analysis of his mental and moral character, and of its intellectual results, seems to me eminently subtile, delicate, and tender. I regret only that it is so short, — for there is much suggested in what you have written that might well be developed, and there are some traits of Hawthorne's genius which scarcely have justice done them in the brevity of your essay. The one point which I should like to have had more fully brought out is the opposition that existed between his heart and his intellect. His genius continually, as it seems to me, overmastered himself, and the depth and fulness of his feelings were forced into channels of expression in which they were confined and against which they struggled in vain. He was always hurting himself, till he became a strange compound of callousness and sensitiveness. But I do not mean to analyze. Your paper is a delightful one and I am very glad to have it.

And now let us rejoice together over the great good news. It lifts the cloud, and the prospect clears. We really see now the beginning of the end. The party that went for peace at Chicago¹ has gone to pieces at Atlanta. The want of practical good sense in our own ranks pains me. The real question at issue is so simple, and the importance of solving it correctly so immense, that I am surprised alike at the confusion of mind and the failure of appreciation of the stake among those who are most deeply interested in the result. Even if Mr. Lincoln were not, as you and I believe, the best candidate, he is now the only possible one for the Union party, and surely, such being the case, personal preferences should be sunk in consideration of the unspeakable evil to which their indulgence may lead. I have little patience with Wade, and Sumner, and Chase, letting their silly vexation at not having a chance for the Presidency thus cloud their patriotism and weaken the strength of the party. . . .

I am glad you were to meet Goldwin Smith at dinner.² He spent his first day on shore with us, — and we had much interesting talk. He is as good at least as his books. I gave him a note to you, and begged him to send it to you in advance of his going to New York that you might meet him there on his arrival, and secure him the right entrance to the big city. Will you give him a note to Seward and to Mr. Lincoln? He does not wish to go to Washington without formal introductions, — and he has now only a letter from Colonel Lawrence (T. Bigelow) which is not the right one for him to carry. . . .

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¹ The Democratic National Convention, which nominated McClellan for the Presidency. It met at Chicago, August 29.

² Goldwin Smith in his Reminiscences writes of his first visit to America: “In 1864, when the war was drawing to a close, I paid a visit to the United States charged with the sympathy of Bright, Cobden, and other British friends of the North as a little antidote to the venom of the too powerful Times.  . . . My friendships are, saving my marriage, the great events of my life; and of my friendships none is more dear than that with Charles Eliot Norton, who was my host, more than hospitable, in Cambridge. He combined the highest European culture with the most fervent love of his own country.”

SOURCE: Sara Norton and  M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 277-9

Nathaniel Hawthorne to Horatio Bridge, May 26, 1861

Concord, May 26, 1861.

My Dear Bridge, — . . . The war, strange to say, has had a beneficial effect upon my spirits, which were flagging wofully before it broke out. But it was delightful to share in the heroic sentiment of the time, and to feel that I had a country, — a consciousness which seemed to make me young again. One thing as regards this matter I regret, and one thing I am glad of. The regrettable thing is that I am too old to shoulder a musket myself, and the joyful thing is that Julian is too young. He drills constantly with a company of lads, and means to enlist as soon as he reaches the minimum age. But I trust we shall either be victorious or vanquished before that time. Meantime, though I approve the war as much as any man, I don't quite understand what we are fighting for, or what definite result can be expected. If we pummel the South ever so hard, they will love us none the better for it; and even if we subjugate them, our next step should be to cut them adrift. If we are fighting for the annihilation of slavery, to be sure it may be a wise object, and offer a tangible result, and the only one which is consistent with a future union between North and South. A continuance of the war would soon make this plain to us, and we should see the expediency of preparing our black brethren for future citizenship by allowing them to fight for their own liberties, and educating them through heroic influences. Whatever happens next, I must say that I rejoice that the old Union is smashed. We never were one people, and never really had a country since the Constitution was formed. . . .

Nath. Hawthorne

SOURCE: Julian Hawthorne,  Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography, Vol. 2, p. 276-7

Charles Eliot Norton to George William Curtis, Monday Evening, September 21, 1863

Shady Hill

Monday evening, 21 September, 1863.

. . . I was glad to see Olmsted,¹ but I wish I had known him before he was just going to leave this quarter of the world. It is hard that he should have to give up the civilization that he likes for the barbarism that he does not like. All the lines of his face imply refinement and sensibility to such a degree that it is not till one has looked through them to what is underneath, that the force of his will and the reserved power of his character become evident. It is a pity that we cannot keep him here. Our society needs organizers almost as much as the Mariposa settlers, miners and squatters need one. However, thanks to the war, the Atlantic and the Pacific States have been bound far closer together than of old, and are every day drawn nearer and nearer. — A ring at the door bell is the occasion of that [ink spot], — and I hear William James's pleasant and manly voice in the other room from which the sound of my Mother's voice has been coming to me as she read aloud the Consular Experiences of the most original of consuls. To-night I am half annoyed, half amused at Hawthorne. He is nearly as bad as Carlyle. His dedication to F. Pierce, — the correspondent of Jefferson Davis, the flatterer of traitors, and the emissary of treason, — reads like the bitterest of satires; and in that I have my satisfaction. The public will laugh. “Praise undeserved” (say the copybooks) “is satire in disguise,” — and what a blow his friend has dealt to the weakest of ex-Presidents. . . .

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¹ Frederick Law Olmsted, whose books on the South had already interested Norton deeply. Their immediate sympathy led to enduring bonds of friendship and cooperation in work for public good.

SOURCE: Sara Norton and  M. A. DeWolfe Howe, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, Volume 1, p. 264-5

Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to John Lothrop Motley, April 29, 1860

Boston, April 29, 1860.

It was so pleasant, my dear Lothrop, to get a letter from you. I have kept it a week or two so as to have something more to tell you, yet I fear it will not be much after all. Yesterday the Saturday Club had its meeting. I carried your letter in my pocket, not to show to anybody, but to read a sentence or two which I knew would interest them all, and especially your kind message of remembrance. All were delighted with it; and on my proposing your health, all of them would rise and drink it standing. We then, at my suggestion, gave three times three in silence, on account of the public character of the place and the gravity and position of the high assisting personages. Be assured that you were heartily and affectionately, not to say proudly, remembered. Your honors are our honors, and when we heard you had received that superior tribute, which stamps any foreigner's reputation as planetary, at the hands of the French Institute, it was as if each of us had had a ribbon tied in his own buttonhole. I hoped very much to pick up something which might interest you from some of our friends who know more of the political movements of the season than I do.

I vote with the Republican party. I cannot hesitate between them and the Democrats. Yet what the Republican party is now doing it would puzzle me to tell you. What its prospects are for the next campaign, perhaps I ought to know, but I do not. I am struck with the fact that we talk very little politics of late at the club. Whether or not it is disgust at the aspect of the present political parties, and especially at the people who represent them, I cannot say; but the subject seems to have been dropped for the present in such society as I move about in, and especially in the club. We discuss first principles, enunciate axioms, tell stories, make our harmless jokes, reveal ourselves in confidence to our next neighbors after the Chateau Margaux has reached the emotional center, and enjoy ourselves mightily. But we do not talk politics. After the President's campaign is begun, it is very likely that we may, and then I shall have something more to say about Mr. Seward and his prospects than I have now.

How much pleasure your praise gave me I hardly dare to say. I know that I can trust it. You would not bestow it unless you liked what I had done, but you would like the same thing better if I had done it than coming from a stranger. That is right and kind and good, and notwithstanding you said so many things to please me, there were none too many. I love praise too well always, and I have had a surfeit of some forms of it. Yours is of the kind that is treasured and remembered. I have written in every number of the “Atlantic” since it began. I should think myself industrious if I did not remember the labors you have gone through, which simply astonish me. What delight it would be to have you back here in our own circle of men — I think we can truly say, whom you would find worthy companions: Agassiz, organizing the science of a hemisphere; Longfellow, writing its songs; Lowell, than whom a larger, fresher, nobler, and more fertile nature does not move among us; Emerson, with his strange, familiar remoteness of character, I do not know what else to call it; and Hawthorne and Dana, when he gets back from his voyage round the world, and all the rest of us thrown in gratis. But you must not stay too long; if all the blood gets out of your veins, I am afraid you will transfer your allegiance.

I am just going to Cambridge to an “exhibition,” in which Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks a translation (expectatur versio in lingua vernacula), the Apology for Socrates; Master O. W. Holmes, Jun., being now a tall youth, almost six feet high, and lover of Plato and of art.

I ought to have said something about your grand new book, but I have not had time to do more than read some passages from it. My impression is that of all your critics, that you have given us one of the noble historical pictures of our time, instinct with life and glowing with the light of a poetical imagination, which by itself would give pleasure, but which, shed over a great epoch in the records of our race, is at once brilliant and permanent. In the midst of so much that renders the very existence of a civilization amongst us problematical to the scholars of the Old World, it is a great pleasure to have the cause of letters so represented by one of our own countrymen, citizens, friends. Your honors belong to us all, but most to those who have watched your upward course from the first, who have shared many of the influences which have formed your own mind and character, and who now regard you as the plenipotentiary of the true Republic accredited to every court in Europe.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Library Edition, Volume 2, p. 87-90

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. to John L. Motley, April 29, 1860

Boston, April 29th, 1860.

It was so pleasant, my dear Lothrop, to get a letter from you. I have kept it a week or two so as to have something more to tell you, yet I fear it will not be much after all. Yesterday, the Saturday Club had its meeting, I carried your letter in my pocket, not to show to anybody, but to read a sentence or two which I knew would interest them all, and especially your kind message of remembrance. All were delighted with it; and on my proposing your health, all of them would rise and drink it standing. We then, at my suggestion, gave three times three in silence, on account of the public character of the place and the gravity and position of the high assisting personages. Be assured that you were heartily and affectionately, not to say proudly, remembered. Your honours are our honours, and when we heard you had received that superior tribute, which stamps any foreigner's reputation as planetary, at the hands of the French Institute, it was as if each of us had had a ribbon tied in his own button-hole. I hoped very much to pick up something which might interest you from some of our friends which know more of the political movements of the season than I do.

I vote with the Republican party. I cannot hesitate between them and the Democrats. Yet what the Republican party is now doing it would puzzle me to tell you. What its prospects are for the next campaign, perhaps I ought to know, but I do not. I am struck with the fact that we talk very little politics of late at the Club. Whether or not it is disgust at the aspect of the present political parties, and especially at the people who represent them, I cannot say; but the subject seems to have been dropped for the present in such society as I move about in, and especially in the Club. We discuss first principles, enunciate axioms, tell stories, make our harmless jokes, reveal ourselves in confidence to our next neighbours after the Chateau Margaux has reached the emotional centre, and enjoy ourselves mightily But we do not talk politics. After the President's campaign is begun, it is very likely that we may, and then I shall have something more to say about Mr. Seward and his prospects than I have now.

How much pleasure your praise gave me I hardly dare to say. I know that I can trust it. You would not bestow it unless you liked what I had done, but you would like the same thing better if I had done it than coming from a stranger. That is right and kind and good, and notwithstanding you said so many things to please me, there were none too many. I love praise too well always, and I have had a surfeit of some forms of it. Yours is of the kind that is treasured and remembered. I have written in every number of the Atlantic since it began. I should think myself industrious if I did not remember the labours you have gone through, which simply astonish me. What delight it would be to have you back here in our own circle of men — I think we can truly say whom you would find worthy companions: Agassiz, organising the science of a hemisphere; Longfellow, writing its songs; Lowell, than whom a larger, fresher, nobler, and more fertile nature does not move among us; Emerson, with his strange, familiar remoteness of character, I do not know what else to call it; and Hawthorne and Dana, when he gets back from his voyage round the world, and all the rest of us thrown in gratis. But you must not stay too long; if all the blood gets out of your veins, I am afraid you will transfer your allegiance.

I am just going to Cambridge to an “exhibition,” in which Oliver Wendell Holmes speaks a translation (expectatur versio in lingua vernacula), the Apology for Socrates; Master O. W. Holmes, Jun., being now a tall youth, almost six feet high, and lover of Plato and of Art.

I ought to have said something about your grand new book, but I have not had time to do more than read some passages from it. My impression is that of all your critics, that you have given us one of the noble historical pictures of our time, instinct with life and glowing with the light of a poetical imagination, which by itself would give pleasure, but which, shed over a great epoch in the records of our race, is at once brilliant and permanent. In the midst of so much that renders the very existence of a civilisation amongst us problematical to the scholars of the Old World, it is a great pleasure to have the cause of letters so represented by one of our own countrymen, citizens, friends. Your honours belong to us all, but most to those who have watched your upward course from the first, who have shared many of the influences which have formed your own mind and character, and who now regard you as the plenipotentiary of the true Republic accredited to every Court in Europe.

SOURCE: George William Curtis, editor, The Correspondence of John Lothrop Motley in Two Volumes, Volume 1, p. 340-2