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_ In "The Dolliver Romance," only three chapters of which the author lived
to complete, we get an intimation as to what would have been the ultimate
form given to that romance founded on the Elixir of Life, for which
"Septimius Felton" was the preliminary study. Having abandoned this study,
and apparently forsaken the whole scheme in 1862, Hawthorne was moved to
renew his meditation upon it in the following year; and as the plan of the
romance had now seemingly developed to his satisfaction, he listened to
the publisher's proposal that it should begin its course as a serial story
in the "Atlantic Monthly" for January, 1864--the first instance in which
he had attempted such a mode of publication.
But the change from England to Massachusetts had been marked by, and had
perhaps in part caused, a decline in his health. Illness in his family,
the depressing and harrowing effect of the Civil War upon his
sensibilities, and anxiety with regard to pecuniary affairs, all combined
to make still further inroads upon his vitality; and so early as the
autumn of 1862 Mrs. Hawthorne noted in her private diary that her husband
was looking "miserably ill." At no time since boyhood had he suffered any
serious sickness, and his strong constitution enabled him to rally from
this first attack; but the gradual decline continued. After sending forth
"Our Old Home," he had little strength for any employment more arduous
than reading, or than walking his accustomed path among the pines and
sweetfern on the hill behind The Wayside, known to his family as the Mount
of Vision. The projected work, therefore, advanced but slowly. He wrote to
Mr. Fields:--
"I don't see much probability of my having the first chapter of the
Romance ready so soon as you want it. There are two or three chapters
ready to be written, but I am not yet robust enough to begin, and I feel
as if I should never carry it through."
The presentiment proved to be only too well founded. He had previously
written:--
"There is something preternatural in my reluctance to begin. I linger at
the threshold, and have a perception of very disagreeable phantasms to be
encountered if I enter. I wish God had given me the faculty of writing a
sunshiny book."
And again, in November, he says: "I foresee that there is little
probability of my getting the first chapter ready by the 15th, although I
have a resolute purpose to write it by the end of the month." He did
indeed send it by that time, but it began to be apparent in January that
he could not go on.
"Seriously," he says, in one letter, "my mind has, for the present, lost
its temper and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better
keep quiet. Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigor if I wait quietly
for it; perhaps not." In another: "I hardly know what to say to the public
about this abortive Romance, though I know pretty well what the case will
be. I shall never finish it.... I cannot finish it unless a great change
comes over me; and if I make too great an effort to do so, it will be my
death."
Finally, work had to be given over indefinitely. In April he went
southward with Mr. Ticknor, the senior partner of his publishing house;
but Mr. Ticknor died suddenly in Philadelphia, and Hawthorne returned to
The Wayside more feeble than ever. He lingered there a little while. Then,
early in May, came the last effort to recover tone, by means of a
carriage-journey, with his friend Ex-President Pierce, through the
southern part of New Hampshire. A week passed, and all was ended: at the
hotel in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he and his companion had stopped
to rest, he died in the night, between the 18th and the 19th of May, 1864.
Like Thackeray and Dickens, he was touched by death's "petrific mace"
before he had had time to do more than lay the groundwork and begin the
main structure of the fiction he had in hand; and, as in the case of
Thackeray, the suddenness of his decease has never been clearly accounted
for. The precise nature of his malady was not known, since with quiet
hopelessness he had refused to take medical advice. His friend Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes was the only physician who had an opportunity to take even
a cursory view of his case, which he did in the course of a brief walk and
conversation in Boston before Hawthorne started with Mr. Pierce; but he
was unable, with that slight opportunity, to reach any definite
conclusion. Dr. Holmes prescribed and had put up for him a remedy to
palliate some of the poignant symptoms, and this Hawthorne carried with
him; but "I feared," Dr. Holmes writes to the editor, "that there was some
internal organic--perhaps malignant--disease; for he looked wasted and as
if stricken with a mortal illness."
The manuscript of the unfinished "Dolliver Romance" lay upon his coffin
during the funeral services at Concord, but, contrary to the impression
sometimes entertained on this point, was not buried with him. It is
preserved in the Concord Public Library. The first chapter was published
in the "Atlantic" as an isolated portion, soon after his death; and
subsequently the second chapter, which he had been unable to revise,
appeared in the same periodical. Between this and the third fragment there
is a gap, for bridging which no material was found among his papers; but,
after hesitating for several years, Mrs. Hawthorne copied and placed in
the publishers' hands that final portion, which, with the two parts
previously printed, constitutes the whole of what Hawthorne had put into
tangible form.
Hawthorne had purposed prefixing a sketch of Thoreau, "because, from a
tradition which he told me about this house of mine, I got the idea of a
deathless man, which is now taking a shape very different from the
original one." This refers to the tradition mentioned in the editor's
note to "Septimius Felton," and forms a link in the interesting chain of
evidence connecting that romance with the "Dolliver Romance." With the
plan respecting Thoreau he combined the idea of writing an
autobiographical preface, wherein The Wayside was to be described, after
the manner of his Introduction to the "Mosses from an Old Manse"; but, so
far as is known, nothing of this was ever actually committed to paper.
Beginning with the idea of producing an English romance, fragments of
which remain to us in "The Ancestral Footstep," and the incomplete work
known as "Doctor Grimshawe's Secret," he replaced these by another design,
of which "Septimius Felton" represents the partial execution. But that
elaborate study yielded, in its turn, to "The Dolliver Romance." The last-
named work, had the author lived to carry it out, would doubtless have
become the vehicle of a profound and pathetic drama, based on the
instinctive yearning of man for an immortal existence, the attempted
gratification of which would have been set forth in a variety of ways:
First, through the selfish old sensualist, Colonel Dabney, who greedily
seized the mysterious elixir and took such a draught of it that he
perished on the spot; then, through the simple old Grandsir, anxious to
live for Pansie's sake; and, perhaps, through Pansie herself, who, coming
into the enjoyment of some ennobling love, would wish to defeat death, so
that she might always keep the perfection of her mundane happiness,--all
these forms of striving to be made the adumbration of a higher one, the
shadow-play that should direct our minds to the true immortality beyond
this world.
G. P. L. _
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