and the hundred details requisite to build up such an impression of
ancestry from the soil, of the way in which the New England past had
entered into the fibre of Hawthorne's nature, of the sort of historic
consciousness that was latent, like clairvoyance, in his imagination.
Here, too, it serves to give Hawthorne a natural right in his new public
place in the community. He did not feel himself a stranger there; the
floor of the Custom House was as much home to his feet as a ship's deck.
He made, it is said, a good surveyor, as in Boston previously he had
been an excellent under officer. His duties were not arduous; they
consumed about three hours and a half of his day, leaving him ample
leisure. He has himself made of his stay at the Custom House a half
humorous story by drawing the characters of his associates and setting
forth the general atmosphere of the place with such lifelike drollery as
only genius can achieve. He does it with no kindly hand. He was capable
of great irritation, at times; and, as was shown on rare occasions, he
had outbursts of anger. Dr. Loring describes him as "tempestuous and
irresistible when aroused," and tells the anecdote of one dismayed
captain who "fled up the wharf and took refuge in the office, inquiring,
'What in God's name have you sent on board my ship as an inspector?'" In
writing of his old associates satirically, he was not indulging in any
rage of anger, but he would hardly have felt the impulse to give his pen
such liberty unless grievances had still rankled in his memory. The
scene he sets forth is one of burlesque, done like fiction. "On
ascending the steps you would discern," he says, "a row of venerable
figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on their
hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were asleep, but
occasionally might be heard talking together, in voices between speech
and a snore, and with that lack of energy that distinguishes the
occupants of almshouses, and all other human beings who depend for
subsistence on charity, on monopolized labor, or anything else but their
own independent exertions. These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew, at
the receipt of customs, but not very liable to be summoned thence, like
him, for apostolic errands--were Custom House officers." When he comes
to the details, in this style, the portrait approaches--if it does not
realize--caricature. There was another side, we may be sure, to the
lives and characters of these men whom Hawthorne has portrayed as if
human nature existed to be the pigment of an artist's brush and should
laugh or weep, look silly or solemn, at the whim of his temperament and
will. All the time he got on with them very amiably, and if he found
some of them in his own silent thoughts rather foolish and superfluous,
doubtless it would have been the same in any other group among whom his
lot might have been thrown. With others of his associates, whatever he
thought of them and their ways, he was friendly and tolerant, if not
sociable; it was in connection with these that the gossip circulated of
his "loafing about with hard drinkers." Dr. Loring describes them to the
life as "a group of men all of whom had remarkable characteristics, not
of the best many times, but original, strong, highly-flavored, defiant
democrats, with whom he was officially connected, who made no appeal to
him, but responded to the uncultivated side of his nature, and to whose
defects he was blind on account of their originality." This picture must
be added to that which Hawthorne gave, and between the two, if some
allowance, also, be made for the unfavorable temper in which he wrote,
it will appear, perhaps, that in the Custom House he found human nature
about as it is always in an office having to do with sea business, in
which naturally a rough, racy, unpolished, original, sturdy stock took a
leading part, and a place was found for the retired old hulks of the
profession to enjoy a comfortable anchorage.
Hawthorne, in fact, repeated in the Custom House the experience he had
formerly had on the Boston wharf and at Brook Farm. At first, the change
was a pleasure and a relief to him. He had once more escaped, if not
from the dreamland of his own solitary fancy, at least from the
unreality which the literary life seems always to have had for him, and
which he now associated particularly with the character of his
friendships. The tone of relief is unmistakable:--
"After my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy
brethren of Brook Farm; after living for three years within the subtile
influence of an intellect like Emerson's; after those wild, free days on
the Assabeth, indulging fantastic speculations, beside our fire of
fallen boughs, with Ellery Channing; after talking with Thoreau about
pine-trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden; after growing
fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture;
after becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's
hearth-stone,--it was time, at length, that I should exercise other
faculties of my nature, and nourish myself with food for which I had
hitherto had little appetite. Even the old inspector was desirable, as a
change of diet, to a man who had known Alcott. I look upon it as an
evidence, in some measure, of a system naturally well balanced, and
lacking no essential part of a thorough organization, that, with such
associates to remember, I could mingle at once with men of altogether
different qualities, and never murmur at the change."
So he mixed in the new scene, laughed with the others at the old
sea-yarns and jokes, joined in with his associates on more even terms
than was his habit with the literary friends of Concord, and was once
more a part of this material world. But it was not long before the old
disgust and restlessness came over him; he felt his imaginative nature
deadened; this after all was not his own life, and the figures that
moved in it, the business they were concerned with, the existence they
led round about him took on the same shabby color of fact that had
formerly spread over the coal and salt of the wharf, and the manure of
Brook Farm; and that feeling of repulsion from it all, which came to
involve also a half-contempt for the people and their affairs, grew in
him. He describes the torpor that fell upon his faculties; he ceased to
write, just as in the earlier time; he could not create, and though he
had time enough, and the sea and the woods and the winter moonlight were
all there, they did not unlock his magical power as of old. He laments
over it, but confesses it; he had temporarily ceased to be a man of
letters.
Domestic affairs contributed to withhold him from his pen. The old
Herbert Street house had proved an inconvenient domicile for the two
families, and they had removed to a dwelling in Chestnut Street. For a
while Mrs. Hawthorne had been absent in Boston, and there a boy, Julian,
had been born, so that there were two children in the nursery. It was in
this room that Hawthorne spent his afternoons, for he had no study, and
there for a year his desk stood, says his wife, without having been once
opened. They moved again to another house, more easily adapted to the
needs of both households, in Mall Street, and here Hawthorne again had a
study "high from all noise," and Madame Hawthorne was provided for with
a suite wholly separate. She and her two daughters still maintained the
lifelong habit of isolation. "Elizabeth," says Mrs. Hawthorne, "is an
invisible entity. I have seen her but once in two years; and Louisa
never intrudes;" and she adds her satisfaction in knowing that Madame
Hawthorne would have the pleasure of her son's and the children's
company for the rest of her life. "I am so glad to win her out of that
Castle Dismal, and from the mysterious chamber into which no mortal ever
peeped till Una was born, and Julian,--for they alone have entered the
_penetralia_. Into that chamber the sun never shines. Into these
rooms in Mall Street it blazes without stint." Mrs. Hawthorne was very
happy in this life with her husband, though they were still retired in
their habits. He had, however, become an officer of the Lyceum, and they
attended the lectures. They went out very seldom, only on such an
occasion as when Emerson was visiting a neighbor, for example. The
happiness was all indoors and in their hearts. "No art nor beauty," the
wife writes, "can excel my daily life, with such a husband and such
children, the exponents of all art and beauty. I really have not even
the temptation to go out of my house to find anything better." The
husband expresses the same felicity, in his turn, repeatedly, as on one
occasion during a visit of Mrs. Hawthorne in Boston. "Oh, Phoebe," he
writes to her, "I want thee much. Thou art the only person in the world
that ever was necessary to me. Other people have occasionally been more
or less agreeable; but I think I was always more at ease alone than in
anybody's company, till I knew thee. And now I am only myself when thou
art within my reach. Thou art an unspeakably beloved woman."
They still spent their evenings together, mostly in reading. He never
wrote at night, and for a year and a half seems not to have written at
all, except some slight unremembered article, it might be, for a Salem
newspaper. In November, 1847, he began to compose regularly every
afternoon. In the year following he produced "The Snow Image," "The
Great Stone Face," "Main Street," and possibly "Ethan Brand," but these,
with the exception of the third, which appeared in Elizabeth Peabody's
"Aesthetic Papers," 1849, remained unpublished. He had exhausted himself
as a writer of short tales and sketches; the kind no longer appealed to
him, and he wrote with much difficulty and against the grain. "At
length," he writes in a letter of literary business, December 14, 1848,
"by main strength I have wrenched and torn an idea out of my miserable
brain; or rather, the fragment of an idea, like a tooth ill-drawn, and
leaving the roots to torture me." His imagination had, in fact, begun to
work upon a larger scale and in a higher world of art, though he
apparently did not know the change in scope that he was undergoing, and
thought of his new story only as a longer tale; the idea of "The Scarlet
Letter," after lying for some years in his brain, was unfolding in the
form of a great romance. It was to be his resource when the Custom House
failed.
It was on June 8, 1849, that the news of his dismissal from office came.
Tyler's Whig administration had come in, and Democratic heads would
naturally fall; but Hawthorne, having obtained office, as he conceived
it, as a literary man provided for by government, had not expected to be
turned out on the change of parties, especially as he was not a partisan
or in fact a politician at all. He resented the action, even when it was
only threatened, as unjust, and took some steps to secure himself in
place by suggesting an appeal to men in Boston, among whom he mentions
Rufus Choate, "whose favorable influence," he says, "would make it
impossible to remove me, and whose support and sympathy might fairly be
obtained on my behalf,--not on the ground that I am a very good writer,
but because I gained my position, such as it is, by my literary
character, and have done nothing to forfeit that tenure." When he found,
however, that he had been removed, ostensibly at least, on the ground of
a paper forwarded from Salem and charging him with political
partisanship, both as a writer for the newspaper press and in his
official capacity, his resentment became a much warmer feeling. The
story of a removal from office is usually unedifying, and there is no
occasion to go into all the details. It appears that one man, Charles W.
Upham, was especially singled out by Hawthorne as the principal mover,
and on him he deliberately avenged himself at a later time. The charges
Hawthorne met very fully and specifically, and showed that he had indeed
rather incurred the reproach of his party for not taking a partisan
course than deserved the criticism of his enemies. He was, however, very
angry; his wife writes to her father, "The lion was roused in him;" and
the numerous letters to his friends show that he was much disturbed, but
much more by what he regarded as the attack made secretly upon his
character than by the loss of the office. There was a small tempest in
the town, in which his friends male and female bore their part, and
plans of one kind and another were discussed to secure his retention;
but, as usually happens in such cases, the affair soon blew over. In a
political scuffle, Hawthorne was a man out of his element.
The most unfortunate thing in the whole incident was the effect it had
on Hawthorne's attachment to his native place. It turned his cold love
to a bitter feeling that he never overcame; and it also threw upon Salem
the reproach of having injured as well as neglected her most famous son.
Citizens of both parties joined in the movement by which he was ousted,
and no one of influence withstood them; but there was probably no enmity
in the matter, and the simple explanation, perhaps, was that the new
candidate had more cordial friends in the community on both sides, for
Hawthorne was not personally popular with the merchants as a class. He
kept them at a distance just as he did men of letters, and could not mix
with them on even and frank terms. Dr. Loring, in discussing the subject
of Hawthorne's treatment by his fellow townsmen, very justly says that
"Salem did not treat its illustrious son, at all, because he gave it no
opportunity." He was, so far as then appeared, an author, forty-five
years old, who had written two or three books of short tales and
sketches, not yet famous, and he held a not very lucrative public
office, which he had secured, not in the usual way, by party service,
but by the political influence of his old college mates, who were
strangers to the town. He was inoffensive, but he was not liked, and
took no pains to make himself one of the community; he was ignored by
the citizens of the place because he ignored them, and when his
Washington friends lost power, there was no one else interested in
keeping him in office, and he had no influence of his own on the spot.
In private life he was uncommonly solitary, and he was in no sense a
public man. What happened was perfectly natural, and might fairly have
been foreseen; for the notion of providing a government post for a man
because he was an author, and retaining him in it by a literary tenure,
must have seemed very novel to the gentlemen of the Essex district in
those days, as it would seem now. But Hawthorne had the sense of
superiority, the silent, suppressed pride, the susceptibility of a
solitary nature; and whatever might be the public side of the matter, of
which he was no very good judge, privately he felt aggrieved and
outraged; that irritability toward the general public which has already
been remarked upon, just because he was "for some years the most obscure
man of letters in America," was condensed, as it were, and discharged
upon Salem, which stood as the deaf and blind and hateful embodiment of
the unappreciative world that would have none of him, but rather took
away the little bread and salt he had contrived to earn for himself, and
would not give him room even in a paltry office among the old sea-dogs
he has described. "I mean as soon as possible," he writes two months
later, "to bid farewell forever to this abominable city."
Apart from the disagreeable circumstances of his removal and the
penniless condition in which it left him, there is no reason to think
that Hawthorne was anything but happy to leave office. His first thought
was of his poverty; before he had laid down the telegram he heard the
wolf at the door. He at once wrote the news to Hillard, and after saying
that he had paid his old debts but had saved nothing, requests his
friendly aid in words through which, brief and straight as they are, one
feels the stern grip of the fact as it immediately took hold on him, the
poor man's need:--
"If you could do anything in the way of procuring me some stated
literary employment, in connection with a newspaper, or as corrector of
the press to some printing establishment, etc., it could not come at a
better time. Perhaps Epes Sargent, who is a friend of mine, would know
of something. I shall not stand upon my dignity; that must take care of
itself. Perhaps there may be some subordinate office connected with the
Boston Athenaeum. Do not think anything too humble to be mentioned to
me.... The intelligence has just reached me, and Sophia has not yet
heard it. She will bear it like a woman,--that is to say, better than a
man."
He went home at once to tell his wife, and as his son tells the story,
on his meeting her expression of pleasure at seeing him so soon with the
remark that "he had left his head behind him," she exclaimed, "Oh, then
you can write your book!" and when he smiled and answered that it "would
be agreeable to know where their bread and rice were to come from while
the story was writing," she brought forth from a hiding-place "a pile of
gold"--it appears to have been one hundred and fifty dollars--that she
had saved from the household weekly expenses. So for the time being
anxiety was lessened.
The fact that Hawthorne was glad at heart to be free again comes out in
many ways. Something may be due to his wife's bearing the news "better
than a man," perhaps, but on the same day it came she is found writing
to her mother, "I have not seen my husband happier than since this
turning out. He has felt in chains for a long time, and being a man he
is not alarmed at being set on his own feet again,--or on his
_head_ I might say, for that contains the available gold of a mine
scarcely yet worked at all." He himself, a few days later, writes to
Hillard, "I have come to feel that it is not good for me to be here. I
am in a lower moral state than I have been--a duller intellectual one.
So let me go; and, under God's providence, I shall arrive at something
better." It would not be long before he would be looking back to the
last three years, and saying, "The life of the Custom House lies like a
dream behind me," in almost the identical words that he used of Boston
wharfs and the Brook Farmers. The pendulum of temperament had swung
again to the other extreme, and he was now all for the imaginative world
once more.
There was, however, to be one sad experience before his new life began.
In the midst of these troubles, while he was still writing his vain
letters and receiving the vain sympathy of his friends in the injury he
had felt, his mother fell into serious illness, and it was plain that
the end of her long vigil was near. With that strange impulse which led
Hawthorne, out of his sensitive reserve and almost morbid seclusion, to
make an open book of his private life, writing it all at large in his
journals, he spent the hours of her last days in describing the scenes
and incidents of the house in its shadow of death. His wife had the main
care of the invalid, and to him was left the charge of the children, Una
and Julian, who played in the yard in the warm July weather and were
seized with the singular fancy of acting over in their play the scenes
of the sick chamber above, while their father watched them from the
window of his room and wrote down their prattle. Hawthorne was attached
to his mother, and had been a good son, but there was something now that
startled his nature, perhaps in the unusual nearness in which he found
himself to her life, and he was hardly prepared for the distress of the
circumstances. His wife wrote, "My husband came near a brain fever after
seeing her for an hour;" and the hour is the one which Hawthorne himself
recorded, in a passage vividly recalling the tone and character of those
scenes in which Carlyle painted the darker moments of his own
shadow-haunted life:--
"About five o'clock I went to my mother's chamber, and was shocked to
see such an alteration since my last visit. I love my mother; but there
has been, ever since boyhood, a sort of coldness of intercourse between
us, such as is apt to come between persons of strong feelings if they
are not managed rightly. I did not expect to be much moved at the
time,--that is to say, not to feel any overpowering emotion struggling
just then,--though I knew that I should deeply remember and regret her.
Mrs. Dike was in the chamber; Louisa pointed to a chair near the bed,
but I was moved to kneel down close by my mother, and take her hand. She
knew me, but could only murmur a few indistinct words; among which I
understood an injunction to take care of my sisters. Mrs. Dike left the
chamber, and then I found the tears slowly gathering in my eyes. I tried
to keep them down, but it would not be; I kept filling up, till, for a
few moments, I shook with sobs. For a long time I knelt there, holding
her hand; and surely it is the darkest hour I ever lived. Afterwards I
stood by the open window and looked through the crevice of the curtain.
The shouts, laughter, and cries of the two children had come up into the
chamber from the open air, making a strange contrast with the death-bed
scene. And now, through the crevice of the curtain, I saw my little Una
of the golden locks, looking very beautiful, and so full of spirit and
life that she was life itself. And then I looked at my poor dying
mother, and seemed to see the whole of human existence at once, standing
in the dusty midst of it."
The next day the children continued the play--they have never left it
off--of their grandmother's death-bed, and Hawthorne writes it all down
in his journal with minute realism. His genius felt some appeal in it
that let him go on unchecked in the transcript of baby-life mocking
death in all innocence and unwitting:--
"Now Una is transformed into grandmamma, and Julian is mamma taking care
of her. She groans, and speaks with difficulty, and moves herself feebly
and wearisomely; then lies perfectly still, as if in an insensible
state; then rouses herself and calls for wine; then lies down on her
back with clasped hands; then puts them to her head. It recalls the
scene of yesterday to me with frightful distinctness; and out of the
midst of it little Una looks at me with a smile of glee. Again, Julian
assumes the character. 'You're dying now,' says Una; 'so you must lie
still,'"--and so the journal goes on through the slow quarter-hours,
till it stops when Madame Hawthorne's heart ceased to beat.
The death of his mother removed the last and only reason for Hawthorne's
continuing to reside in Salem, but he remained there through the summer
and winter. He was hard at work on "The Scarlet Letter," perhaps being
more absorbed in it than he ever was in any other of his compositions.
It was a time of much trouble in every way. There was sickness in the
family, he was himself afflicted with pain, and his wife's sister
Elizabeth Peabody seems to have come to the rescue of domestic comfort
for the household. O'Sullivan, the kind-hearted editor of the defunct
"Democratic Review," bethought himself of his old debt to Hawthorne and
sent him a hundred dollars; so the purse was replenished. It was in
early winter that the cheerful personality of James T. Fields, the
publisher, appeared on the scene, and it was a fortunate hour for
Hawthorne that brought such an appreciative, enthusiastic, and faithful
friend to his door. Fields was just the man to warm Hawthorne's genius
into action,--cordial, whole-souled, and happily not so much a man of
letters as to repel him with that alienation which he certainly felt in
his contact with authors by profession like Emerson and his other
contemporaries. Fields was, too, in a very real sense, the messenger and
herald of fame standing at last in the humble doorway of the Mall Street
house that had latterly been the scene of such a tangle of human events.
The anecdote of what he found there is finely told in his own words:--