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THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE
THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE 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.
THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
A SCENE FROM THE DOLLIVER ROMANCE.
Dr. Dolliver a worthy personage of extreme antiquity was aroused rather
prematurely one summer morning by the shouts of the child Pansie in an
adjoining chamber summoning old Martha (who performed the duties of
nurse housekeeper and kitchen-maid in the Doctor's establishment) to
take up her little ladyship and dress her. The old gentleman woke with
more than his customary alacrity and after taking a moment to gather his
wits about him pulled aside the faded moreen curtains of his ancient bed
and thrust his head into a beam of sunshine that caused him to wink and
withdraw it again. This transitory glimpse of good Dr. Dolliver showed a
flannel night-cap fringed round with stray locks of silvery white hair
and surmounting a meagre and duskily yellow visage which was crossed and
criss-crossed with a record of his long life in wrinkles faithfully
written no doubt but with such cramped chirography of Father Time that
the purport was illegible. It seemed hardly worth while for the patriarch
to get out of bed any more and bring his forlorn shadow into the summer
day that was made for younger folks. The Doctor however was by no means
of that opinion being considerably encouraged towards the toil of living
twenty-four hours longer by the comparative ease with which he found
himself going through the usually painful process of bestirring his rusty
joints (stiffened by the very rest and sleep that should have made them
pliable) and putting them in a condition to bear his weight upon the
floor. Nor was he absolutely disheartened by the idea of those tonsorial
ablutionary and personally decorative labors which are apt to become so
intolerably irksome to an old gentleman after performing them daily and
daily for fifty sixty or seventy years and finding them still as
immitigably recurrent as at first. Dr. Dolliver could nowise account for
this happy condition of his spirits and physical energies until he
remembered taking an experimental sip of a certain cordial which was long
ago prepared by his grandson and carefully sealed up in a bottle and had
been reposited in a dark closet among a parcel of effete medicines ever
since that gifted young man's death.
"It may have wrought effect upon me" thought the doctor shaking his head
as he lifted it again from the pillow. "It may be so; for poor Edward
oftentimes instilled a strange efficacy into his perilous drugs. But I
will rather believe it to be the operation of God's mercy which may have
temporarily invigorated my feeble age for little Pansie's sake."
A twinge of his familiar rheumatism as he put his foot out of bed taught
him that he must not reckon too confidently upon even a day's respite from
the intrusive family of aches and infirmities which with their
proverbial fidelity to attachments once formed had long been the closest
acquaintances that the poor old gentleman had in the world. Nevertheless
he fancied the twinge a little less poignant than those of yesterday; and
moreover after stinging him pretty smartly it passed gradually off with
a thrill which in its latter stages grew to be almost agreeable. Pain
is but pleasure too strongly emphasized. With cautious movements and only
a groan or two the good Doctor transferred himself from the bed to the
floor where he stood awhile gazing from one piece of quaint furniture to
another (such as stiff-backed Mayflower chairs an oaken chest-of-drawers
carved cunningly with shapes of animals and wreaths of foliage a table
with multitudinous legs a family record in faded embroidery a shelf of
black-bound books a dirty heap of gallipots and phials in a dim
corner)--gazing at these things and steadying himself by the bedpost
while his inert brain still partially benumbed with sleep came slowly
into accordance with the realities about him. The object which most helped
to bring Dr. Dolliver completely to his waking perceptions was one that
common observers might suppose to have been snatched bodily out of his
dreams. The same sunbeam that had dazzled the doctor between the bed-
curtains gleamed on the weather-beaten gilding which had once adorned this
mysterious symbol and showed it to be an enormous serpent twining round
a wooden post and reaching quite from the floor of the chamber to its
ceiling.
It was evidently a thing that could boast of considerable antiquity the
dry-rot having eaten out its eyes and gnawed away the tip of its tail; and
it must have stood long exposed to the atmosphere for a kind of gray moss
had partially overspread its tarnished gilt surface and a swallow or
other familiar little bird in some by-gone summer seemed to have built
its nest in the yawning and exaggerated mouth. It looked like a kind of
Manichean idol which might have been elevated on a pedestal for a century
or so enjoying the worship of its votaries in the open air until the
impious sect perished from among men--all save old Dr. Dolliver who had
set up the monster in his bedchamber for the convenience of private
devotion. But we are unpardonable in suggesting such a fantasy to the
prejudice of our venerable friend knowing him to have been as pious and
upright a Christian and with as little of the serpent in his character
as ever came of Puritan lineage. Not to make a further mystery about a
very simple matter this bedimmed and rotten reptile was once the medical
emblem or apothecary's sign of the famous Dr. Swinnerton who practised
physic in the earlier days of New England when a head of Aesculapius or
Hippocrates would have vexed the souls of the righteous as savoring of
heathendom. The ancient dispenser of drugs had therefore set up an image
of the Brazen Serpent and followed his business for many years with great
credit under this Scriptural device; and Dr. Dolliver being the
apprentice pupil and humble friend of the learned Swinnerton's old age
had inherited the symbolic snake and much other valuable property by his
bequest.
While the patriarch was putting on his small-clothes he took care to
stand in the parallelogram of bright sunshine that fell upon the
uncarpeted floor. The summer warmth was very genial to his system and yet
made him shiver; his wintry veins rejoiced at it though the reviving
blood tingled through them with a half-painful and only half-pleasurable
titillation. For the first few moments after creeping out of bed he kept
his back to the sunny window and seemed mysteriously shy of glancing
thitherward; but as the June fervor pervaded him more and more
thoroughly he turned bravely about and looked forth at a burial-ground
on the corner of which he dwelt. There lay many an old acquaintance who
had gone to sleep with the flavor of Dr. Dolliver's tinctures and powders
upon his tongue; it was the patient's final bitter taste of this world
and perhaps doomed to be a recollected nauseousness in the next.
Yesterday in the chill of his forlorn old age the Doctor expected soon
to stretch out his weary bones among that quiet community and might
scarcely have shrunk from the prospect on his own account except indeed
that he dreamily mixed up the infirmities of his present condition with
the repose of the approaching one being haunted by a notion that the damp
earth under the grass and dandelions must needs be pernicious for his
cough and his rheumatism. But this morning the cheerful sunbeams or the
mere taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime or the
fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people had caused
an unfrozen drop of youthfulness somewhere within him to expand.
"Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor hoping with one effort to clear his throat
of the dregs of a ten-years' cough. "Matters are not so far gone with me
as I thought. I have known mighty sensible men when only a little age-
stricken or otherwise out of sorts to die of mere faint-heartedness a
great deal sooner than they need."
He shook his silvery head at his own image in the looking-glass as if to
impress the apothegm on that shadowy representative of himself; and for
his part he determined to pluck up a spirit and live as long as he
possibly could if it were only for the sake of little Pansie who stood
as close to one extremity of human life as her great-grandfather to the
other. This child of three years old occupied all the unfossilized portion
of Dr. Dolliver's heart. Every other interest that he formerly had and
the entire confraternity of persons whom he once loved had long ago
departed; and the poor Doctor could not follow them because the grasp of
Pansie's baby-fingers held him back.
So he crammed a great silver watch into his fob and drew on a patchwork
morning-gown of an ancient fashion. Its original material was said to have
been the embroidered front of his own wedding-waistcoat and the silken
skirt of his wife's bridal attire which his eldest granddaughter had
taken from the carved chest-of-drawers after poor Bessie the beloved of
his youth had been half a century in the grave. Throughout many of the
intervening years as the garment got ragged the spinsters of the old
man's family had quilted their duty and affection into it in the shape of
patches upon patches rose-color crimson blue violet and green and
then (as their hopes faded and their life kept growing shadier and their
attire took a sombre hue) sober gray and great fragments of funereal
black until the Doctor could revive the memory of most things that had
befallen him by looking at his patchwork-gown as it hung upon a chair.
And now it was ragged again and all the fingers that should have mended
it were cold. It had an Eastern fragrance too a smell of drugs strong-
scented herbs and spicy gums gathered from the many potent infusions
that had from time to time been spilt over it; so that snuffing him afar
off you might have taken Dr. Dolliver for a mummy and could hardly have
been undeceived by his shrunken and torpid aspect as he crept nearer.
Wrapt in his odorous and many-colored robe he took staff in hand and
moved pretty vigorously to the head of the staircase. As it was somewhat
steep and but dimly lighted he began cautiously to descend putting his
left hand on the banister and poking down his long stick to assist him in
making sure of the successive steps; and thus he became a living
illustration of the accuracy of Scripture where it describes the aged as
being "afraid of that which is high"--a truth that is often found to have
a sadder purport than its external one. Half-way to the bottom however
the Doctor heard the impatient and authoritative tones of little Pansie--
Queen Pansie as she might fairly have been styled in reference to her
position in the household--calling amain for grandpapa and breakfast. He
was startled into such perilous activity by the summons that his heels
slid on the stairs the slippers were shuffled off his feet and he saved
himself from a tumble only by quickening his pace and coming down at
almost a run.
"Mercy on my poor old bones!" mentally exclaimed the Doctor fancying
himself fractured in fifty places. "Some of them are broken surely and
methinks my heart has leaped out of my mouth! What! all right? Well
well! but Providence is kinder to me than I deserve prancing down this
steep staircase like a kid of three months old!"
He bent stiffly to gather up his slippers and fallen staff; and meanwhile
Pansie had heard the tumult of her great-grandfather's descent and was
pounding against the door of the breakfast-room in her haste to come at
him. The Doctor opened it and there she stood a rather pale and large-
eyed little thing quaint in her aspect as might well be the case with a
motherless child dwelling in an uncheerful house with no other playmates
than a decrepit old man and a kitten and no better atmosphere within-
doors than the odor of decayed apothecary's stuff nor gayer neighborhood
than that of the adjacent burial-ground where all her relatives from her
great-grandmother downward lay calling to her "Pansie Pansie it is
bedtime!" even in the prime of the summer morning. For those dead women-
folk especially her mother and the whole row of maiden aunts and grand-
aunts could not but be anxious about the child knowing that little
Pansie would be far safer under a tuft of dandelions than if left alone
as she soon must be in this difficult and deceitful world.
Yet in spite of the lack of damask roses in her cheeks she seemed a
healthy child and certainly showed great capacity of energetic movement
in the impulsive capers with which she welcomed her venerable progenitor.
She shouted out her satisfaction moreover (as her custom was having
never had any oversensitive auditors about her to tame down her voice)
till even the Doctor's dull ears were full of the clamor.
"Pansie darling" said Dr. Dolliver cheerily patting her brown hair
with his tremulous fingers "thou hast put some of thine own friskiness
into poor old grandfather this fine morning! Dost know child that he
came near breaking his neck down-stairs at the sound of thy voice? What
wouldst thou have done then little Pansie?"
"Kiss poor grandpapa and make him well!" answered the child remembering
the Doctor's own mode of cure in similar mishaps to herself. "It shall do
poor grandpapa good!" she added putting up her mouth to apply the remedy.
"Ah little one thou hast greater faith in thy medicines than ever I had
in my drugs" replied the patriarch with a giggle surprised and
delighted at his own readiness of response. "But the kiss is good for my
feeble old heart Pansie though it might do little to mend a broken neck;
so give grandpapa another dose and let us to breakfast."
In this merry humor they sat down to the table great-grandpapa and Pansie
side by side and the kitten as soon appeared making a third in the
party. First she showed her mottled head out of Pansie's lap delicately
sipping milk from the child's basin without rebuke: then she took post on
the old gentleman's shoulder purring like a spinning-wheel trying her
claws in the wadding of his dressing-gown and still more impressively
reminding him of her presence by putting out a paw to intercept a warmed-
over morsel of yesterday's chicken on its way to the Doctor's mouth. After
skilfully achieving this feat she scrambled down upon the breakfast-table
and began to wash her face and hands. Evidently these companions were all
three on intimate terms as was natural enough since a great many
childish impulses were softly creeping back on the simple-minded old man;
insomuch that if no worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had
disturbed him his remnant of life might have been as cheaply and cheerily
enjoyed as the early playtime of the kitten and the child. Old Dr.
Dolliver and his great-granddaughter (a ponderous title which seemed
quite to overwhelm the tiny figure of Pansie) had met one another at the
two extremities of the life-circle: her sunrise served him for a sunset
illuminating his locks of silver and hers of golden brown with a
homogeneous shimmer of twinkling light.
Little Pansie was the one earthly creature that inherited a drop of the
Dolliver blood. The Doctor's only child poor Bessie's offspring had died
the better part of a hundred years before and his grandchildren a
numerous and dimly remembered brood had vanished along his weary track in
their youth maturity or incipient age till hardly knowing how it had
all happened he found himself tottering onward with an infant's small
fingers in his nerveless grasp. So mistily did his dead progeny come and
go in the patriarch's decayed recollection that this solitary child
represented for him the successive babyhoods of the many that had gone
before. The emotions of his early paternity came back to him. She seemed
the baby of a past age oftener than she seemed Pansie. A whole family of
grand-aunts (one of whom had perished in her cradle never so mature as
Pansie now another in her virgin bloom another in autumnal maidenhood
yellow and shrivelled with vinegar in her blood and still another a
forlorn widow whose grief outlasted even its vitality and grew to be
merely a torpid habit and was saddest then)--all their hitherto
forgotten features peeped through the face of the great-grandchild and
their long-inaudible voices sobbed shouted or laughed in her familiar
tones. But it often happened to Dr. Dolliver while frolicking amid this
throng of ghosts where the one reality looked no more vivid than its
shadowy sisters--it often happened that his eyes filled with tears at a
sudden perception of what a sad and poverty-stricken old man he was
already remote from his own generation and bound to stray further onward
as the sole playmate and protector of a child!
As Dr. Dolliver in spite of his advanced epoch of life is likely to
remain a considerable time longer upon our hands we deem it expedient to
give a brief sketch of his position in order that the story may get
onward with the greater freedom when he rises from the breakfast-table.
Deeming it a matter of courtesy we have allowed him the honorary title of
Doctor as did all his towns-people and contemporaries except perhaps
one or two formal old physicians stingy of civil phrases and over-jealous
of their own professional dignity. Nevertheless these crusty graduates
were technically right in excluding Dr. Dolliver from their fraternity. He
had never received the degree of any medical school nor (save it might be
for the cure of a toothache or a child's rash or a whitlow on a
seamstress's finger or some such trifling malady) had he ever been even a
practitioner of the awful science with which his popular designation
connected him. Our old friend in short even at his highest social
elevation claimed to be nothing more than an apothecary and in these
later and far less prosperous days scarcely so much. Since the death of
his last surviving grandson (Pansie's father whom he had instructed in
all the mysteries of his science and who being distinguished by an
experimental and inventive tendency was generally believed to have
poisoned himself with an infallible panacea of his own distillation)--
since that final bereavement Dr. Dolliver's once pretty flourishing
business had lamentably declined. After a few months of unavailing
struggle he found it expedient to take down the Brazen Serpent from the
position to which Dr. Swinnerton had originally elevated it in front of
his shop in the main street and to retire to his private dwelling
situated in a by-lane and on the edge of a burial-ground.
This house as well as the Brazen Serpent some old medical books and a
drawer full of manuscripts had come to him by the legacy of Dr.
Swinnerton. The dreariness of the locality had been of small importance to
our friend in his young manhood when he first led his fair wife over the
threshold and so long as neither of them had any kinship with the human
dust that rose into little hillocks and still kept accumulating beneath
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