and as the day was cold, he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk
about his future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him,
in a very desponding mood. 'Now,' said I, 'is the time for you to
publish, for I know during these years in Salem you must have got
something ready for the press.' 'Nonsense,' said he, 'what heart had I
to write anything, when my publishers have been so many years trying to
sell a small edition of the "Twice-Told Tales"?' I still pressed upon
him the good chances he would have now with something new. 'Who would
risk publishing a book for _me_, the most unpopular writer in
America?' 'I would,' said I, 'and would start with an edition of two
thousand copies of anything you write.' 'What madness!' he exclaimed;
'Your friendship for me gets the better of your judgment. No, no,' he
continued; 'I have no money to indemnify a publisher's losses on my
account.' I looked at my watch, and found that the train would soon be
starting for Boston, and I knew there was not much time to lose in
trying to discover what had been his literary work during these last few
years in Salem. I remember that I pressed him to reveal to me what he
had been writing. He shook his head, and gave me to understand that he
had produced nothing. At that moment I caught sight of a bureau or set
of drawers near where we were sitting; and immediately it occurred to me
that hidden away somewhere in that article of furniture was a story or
stories by the author of the 'Twice-Told Tales,' and I became so
positive of it that I charged him vehemently with the fact. He seemed
surprised, I thought, but shook his head again; and I rose to take my
leave, begging him not to come into the cold entry, saying I would come
back and see him again in a few days. I was hurrying down the stairs
when he called after me from the chamber, asking me to stop a moment.
Then quickly stepping into the entry with a roll of manuscript in his
hands, he said: 'How, in Heaven's name, did you know this thing was
there? As you found me out, take what I have written, and tell me, after
you get home and have time to read it, if it is good for anything. It is
either very good or very bad,--I don't know which.' On my way up to
Boston I read the germ of 'The Scarlet Letter.'"
The romance that was thus captured was not yet in the form which it
finally took. Hawthorne had conceived it as a rather longer tale of the
same sort that he had previously written, and designed to make it one
story in a new collection such as his former volumes had been. He
thought it was too gloomy to stand alone, and in fact did not suspect
that here was a new kind of work, such that it would put an end forever
to his old manner of writing. He intended to call the new volume
"Old-Time Legends: together with Sketches, Experimental and Ideal,"--a
title that is fairly ghostly with the transcendental nonage of his
genius, pale, abstract, ineffectual, with oblivion lurking in every
syllable. Fields knew better than that. But he gave him something more
than advice; he cheered him with his extravagant appreciation, as it
seemed to Hawthorne, and invigorated him by a true sympathy with his
success. Fields urged that the story be elaborated, filled out, and made
into a single volume; and, under this wise suggestion, Hawthorne went to
work upon it with renewed interest and with something probably of the
power of a new ambition.
His friends, too, had come to his aid with material assistance, and
apart from the fact that he was thus enabled to go on with the labor of
composition, free from the immediate pressure of poverty and its trials
of the spirit, he was stimulated by their confidence and kindness to do
all he could for himself. Hillard was the medium of this friendliness,
and accompanied the considerable sum of money with a letter, January 17,
1850:--
"It occurred to me and some other of your friends that, in consideration
of the events of the last year, you might at this time be in need of a
little pecuniary aid. I have therefore collected, from some of those who
admire your genius and respect your character, the enclosed sum of
money, which I send you with my warmest wishes for your health and
happiness. I know the sensitive edge of your temperament; but do not
speak or think of obligation. It is only paying, in a very imperfect
measure, the debt we owe you for what you have done for American
Literature. Could you know the readiness with which every one to whom I
applied contributed to this little offering, and could you have heard
the warm expressions with which some accompanied their gift, you would
have felt that the bread you had cast upon the waters had indeed come
back to you. Let no shadow of despondency, my dear friend, steal over
you. Your friends do not and will not forget you. You shall be protected
against 'eating cares,' which, I take it, mean cares lest we should not
have enough to eat."
Kindly as this letter was, it could only temper what was for Hawthorne a
rough and bitter experience; for he had, in intense form, that proud
independence in such matters which characterizes the old New England
stock. The words he wrote in reply came from the depths of his nature:--
"I read your letter in the vestibule of the Post Office; and it
drew--what my troubles never have--the water to my eyes; so that I was
glad of the sharply cold west wind that blew into them as I came
homeward, and gave them an excuse for being red and bleared.
"There was much that was very sweet--and something, too, that was very
bitter--mingled with that same moisture. It is sweet to be remembered
and cared for by one's friends--some of whom know me for what I am,
while others, perhaps, know me only through a generous faith--sweet to
think that they deem me worth upholding in my poor work through life.
And it is bitter, nevertheless, to need their support. It is something
else besides pride that teaches me that ill-success in life is really
and justly a matter of shame. I am ashamed of it, and I ought to be. The
fault of a failure is attributable--in a great degree at least--to the
man who fails. I should apply this truth in judging of other men; and it
behooves me not to shun its point or edge in taking it home to my
_own_ heart. Nobody has a right to live in the world unless he be
strong and able, and applies his ability to good purpose.
"The money, dear Hillard, will smooth my path for a long time to come.
The only way in which a man can retain his self-respect, while availing
himself of the generosity of his friends, is by making it an incitement
to his utmost exertion, so that he may not need their help again. I
shall look upon it so--nor will shun any drudgery that my hand shall
find to do, if thereby I may win bread."
Four days after this, on February 3, 1850, he finished "The Scarlet
Letter." He read the last scene to his wife, just after writing it, on
that evening,--"tried to read it, rather," he wrote to Bridge the next
day, "for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down
on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But I was in a very nervous
state then, having gone through a great diversity of emotion while
writing it for many months." He had, indeed, put his whole energy into
the book, writing "immensely," says his wife in the previous autumn, as
much as nine hours a day. He now felt the reaction, and besides he had a
less healthy regimen of life than hitherto, and had fallen into
middle-age habits of lowered physical tone, less active now in his
out-door life these last three or four years. He continues in the letter
to Bridge, just quoted: "I long to get into the country, for my health
latterly is not quite what it has been for many years past. I should not
long stand such a life of bodily inactivity and mental exertion as I
have lived for the last few months. An hour or two of daily labor in a
garden, and a daily ramble in country air, or on the sea-shore, would
keep all right. Here, I hardly go out once a week. Do not allude to this
matter in your letters to me, as my wife already sermonizes me quite
sufficiently on my habits; and I never own up to not feeling perfectly
well. Neither do I feel anywise ill; but only a lack of physical vigor
and energy, which reacts upon the mind." "The Scarlet Letter" [Footnote:
_The Scarlet Letter_. A Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston:
Ticknor, Reed and Fields. 1850. 12mo. Pp. iv, 322.] was already in the
publisher's hands, before the last scene was written, and was rapidly
put through the press. It was issued early in April in an edition of
five thousand copies, which was soon exhausted; a new edition followed
at once, and Hawthorne's fame was at last established.
"The Scarlet Letter" is a great and unique romance, standing apart by
itself in fiction; there is nothing else quite like it. Of all
Hawthorne's works it is most identified with his genius in popular
regard, and it has the peculiar power that is apt to invest the first
work of an author in which his originality finds complete artistic
expression. It is seldom that one can observe so plainly the different
elements that are primary in a writer's endowment coalesce in the fully
developed work of genius; yet in this romance there is nothing either in
method or perception which is not to be found in the earlier tales; what
distinguishes it is the union of art and intuition as they had grown up
in Hawthorne's practice and had developed a power to penetrate more
deeply into life. Obviously at the start there is the physical object in
which his imagination habitually found its spring, the fantastically
embroidered scarlet letter on a woman's bosom which he had seen in the
Puritan group described in "Endicott and the Red Cross." It had been in
his mind for years, and his thoughts had centred on it and wandered out
from it, tracking its mystery. It has in itself that decorative quality,
which he sought in the physical object,--the brilliant and rich effect,
startling to the eye and yet more to the imagination as it blazes forth
with a secret symbolism and almost intelligence of its own. It
multiplies itself, as the tale unfolds, with greater intensity and
mysterious significance and dread suggestion, as if in mirrors set round
about it,--in the slowly disclosed and fearful stigma on the minister's
hidden heart over which he ever holds his hand, where it has become
flesh of his flesh; in the growing elf-like figure of the child, who,
with her eyes always fastened on the open shame of the letter on her
mother's bosom or the hidden secret of the hand on her father's breast,
has become herself the symbol, half revealed and half concealed, is
dressed in it, as every reader remembers, and fantastically embodies it
as if the thing had taken life in her; and, as if this were not enough,
the scarlet letter, at a climax of the dark story, lightens forth over
the whole heavens as a symbol of what cannot be hid even in the
intensest blackness of night. The continual presence of the letter seems
to have burnt into Hawthorne's own mind, till at the end of the
narrative he says he would gladly erase its deep print from the brain
where long meditation had fixed it. In no other work is the physical
symbol so absorbingly present, so reduplicated, so much alive in itself.
It is the brand of sin on life. Its concrete vividness leads the author
also by a natural compulsion as well as an artistic instinct to display
his story in that succession of high-wrought scenes, tableaux, in fact,
which was his characteristic method of narrative, picturesque,
pictorial, almost to be described as theatrical in spectacle. The
background, also, as in the early tales, is of the slightest, no more
than will suffice for the acting of the drama as a stage setting
sympathetic with the central scene,--a town, with a prison, a
meeting-house, a pillory, a governor's house, other habitations on a
street, a lonely cottage by the shore, the forest round about all; and
for occasion and accessories, only a woman's sentence, the incidental
death of Winthrop unmarked in itself, a buccaneering ship in the harbor,
Indians, Spanish sailors, rough matrons, clergy; this will serve, for
such was Hawthorne's fine economy, knowing that this story was one in
which every materialistic element must be used at its lowest tone.
Though the scene lay in this world, it was but transitory scaffolding;
the drama was one of the eternal life.
The characteristic markings of Hawthorne's genius are also to be found
in other points. He does not present the scene of life, the crowd of the
world with its rich and varied fullness of interest, complexity of
condition and movement, and its interwoven texture of character, event,
and fate, such as the great novelists use; he has only a few individual
figures, and these are simplified by being exhibited, not in their
complete lives, but only in that single aspect of their experience which
was absorbing to themselves and constituted the life they lived in the
soul itself. There are three characters, Hester, the minister, and the
physician; and a fourth, the child, who fulfills the function of the
chorus in the old drama, in part a living comment, in part a spectator
and medium of sympathy with the main actors. In all four of these that
trait of profound isolation in life, so often used before in the earlier
tales, is strongly brought out; about each is struck a circle which
separates not only one from another, but from all the world, and in the
midst of it, as in a separate orb, each lives an unshared life. It is
inherent, too, in such a situation that the mystery that had fascinated
Hawthorne in so many forms, the secrecy of men's bosoms, should be a
main theme in the treatment. He has also had recourse to that method of
violent contrast which has been previously illustrated; on the one hand
the publicity of detected wrongdoing, on the other the hidden and
unsuspected fact; here the open shame and there the secret sin, whose
sameness in a double life is expressed by the identity of the
embroidered letter and the flesh-wrought stigma. But it is superfluous
to illustrate further the genesis of this romance out of Hawthorne's art
and matter in his earlier work, showing how naturally it rose by a
concentration of his powers on a single theme that afforded them scope,
intensity, and harmony at once. The new thing here is the power of his
genius to penetrate, as was said above, deep into life.
The romance begins where common tales end. The crime has been committed;
in it, in its motives, circumstances, explanation, its course of passion
and human tide of life, Hawthorne takes no interest. All that is past,
and, whatever it was, now exists only as sin; it has passed from the
region of earthly fact into that of the soul, out of all that was
temporal into the world where eternal things only are. Not crime, not
passion, not the temptation and the fall, but only sin now staining the
soul in consequence is the theme; and the course of the story concerns
man's dealing with sin, in his own breast or the breasts of others. It
is a study of punishment, of vengeance if one will; this is the secret
of its gloom, for the idea of salvation, of healing, is but little
present and is not felt; there is no forgiveness in the end, in any
sense to dispel the darkness of evil or promise the dawn of new life in
any one of these tortured souls. The sin of the lovers is not the centre
of the story, but only its initial source; that sin breeds sin is the
real principle of its being; the minister is not punished as a lover,
but as the hypocrite that he becomes, and the physician is punished as
the revenger that he becomes. Hester's punishment is visibly from the
law, and illustrates the law's brutality, the coarse hand of man for
justice, the mere physical blow meant to hurt and crush; it is man's
social way of dealing with sin, and fails because it makes no connection
with the soul; the victim rises above it, is emancipated from its ideas,
transforms the symbol of disgrace into a message of mercy to all who
suffer, and annuls the gross sentence by her own higher soul-power. The
minister's punishment, also, is visibly from the physician, who
illustrates man's individual way of dealing with sin in another; but it
is not the minister's suffering under the hand of revenge working subtly
in secret that arrests our attention; it is the physician's own
degeneracy into a devil of hate through enjoyment of the sight and
presence of this punishment, that stamps him into the reader's mind as a
type of the failure of such a revenge. "Vengeance is mine, saith the
Lord" is the text here blazed forth. In the sphere of the soul human law
and private revenge have no place. It is in that sphere that Hester is
seen suffering in the touch of the child, being unable to adjust the
broken harmonies of life; her incapacity to do that is the ever-present
problem that keeps her wound open, not to be stanched, but rather
breaking with a more intimate pain with the unfolding of little Pearl's
wide-eyed soul. In that sphere, too, the minister is seen suffering--not
for the original sin, for that is overlaid, whelmed, forgotten, by the
second and heavier transgression of hypocrisy, cowardice,
desertion,--but merely from self-knowledge, the knowledge that he is a
living lie. The characters, so treated, become hardly more than types,
humanly outlined in figure, costume, and event, symbolic pictures of
states of the soul, so simplified, so intense, so elementary as to
belong to a phantasmagoric rather than a realistic world, to that mirror
of the soul which is not found in nature but in spiritual
self-consciousness, where the soul is given back to itself in its
nakedness, as in a secret place.
Yet it is in the sense of reality that this romance is most intense. It
is a truthful story, above all; and only its truth could make it
tolerable to the imagination and heart, if indeed it be tolerable to the
heart at all. A part of this reality is due to the fact that there is a
story here that lies outside of the moral scheme in which Hawthorne's
conscious thought would confine it; the human element in it threatens
from time to time to break the mould of thought and escape from bondage,
because, simple as the moral scheme is, human life is too complex to be
solved by it even in this small world of the three guilty ones and the
child. This weakness of the moral scheme, this rude strength of human
nature, this sense of a larger solution, are most felt when Hawthorne
approaches the love element, and throughout in the character of Hester,
in whom alone human nature retains a self-assertive power. The same
thing is felt vaguely, but certainly, in the lack of sympathy between
Hawthorne and the Puritan environment he depicts. He presents the
community itself, its common people, its magistrates and clergy, its
customs, temper, and atmosphere, as forbidding, and he has no good word
for it; harshness characterizes it, and that trait discredits its
ideals, its judgments, and its entire interpretation of life. Hester,
outcast from it, is represented as thereby enfranchised from its
narrowness, enlightened, escaped into a world of larger truth:--
"The world's law was no law for her mind. It was an age in which the
human intellect, newly emancipated, had taken a more active and a wider
range than for many centuries before. Men of the sword had overthrown
nobles and kings. Men bolder than these had overthrown and
rearranged--not actually, but within the sphere of theory, which was
their most real abode--the whole system of ancient prejudice, wherewith
was linked much of ancient principle. Hester Prynne imbibed this spirit.
She assumed a freedom of speculation, then common enough on the other
side of the Atlantic, but which our forefathers, had they known it,
would have held to be a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the
scarlet letter. In her lonesome cottage, by the sea-shore, thoughts
visited her, such as dared to enter no other dwelling in New England;
shadowy guests, that would have been as perilous as demons to their
entertainer, could they have been seen so much as knocking at her door."
This is the foregleam of the next age, felt in her mind, the coming of a
larger day. Hawthorne does not develop this or justify it; he only
states it as a fact of life. And in the motive of the story, the love of
Hester and Arthur, much is left dim; but what is discerned threatens to
be unmanageable within the limits of the scheme. Did Hester love her
lover, and he love her, through those seven years in silence? Did either
of them ever repent their passion for its own sake? And when Hester's
womanhood came back in its bloom and her hair fell shining in the forest
sunlight, and she took her lover, hand and head and form, in all his
broken suffering to her affectionate care and caress, and planned the
bold step that they go out together across the seas and live in each
other's lives like lovers in truth and reality,--was this only the
resurrection of a moment or the firm vital force of a seven years'
silent passion? Had either of them ever repented, though one was a
coward and the other a condemned and public criminal before the law, and
both had suffered? Was not the true sin, as is suggested, the source of
all this error, the act of the physician who had first violated Hester's
womanhood in a loveless marriage as he had now in Arthur's breast
"violated in cold blood the sanctity of a human heart"? "Thou and I,"
says Arthur, "never did so." The strange words follow, strange for
Hawthorne to have written, but better attesting his truth to human
nature than all his morality:--
"Never, never!" whispered she. "What we did had a consecration of its
own. We felt it so! We said so to each other! Hast thou forgotten it?"
"Hush, Hester!" said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground. "No; I
have not forgotten!"
That confession is the stroke of genius in the romance that humanizes it
with a thrill that is felt through every page of the stubborn, dark,
harsh narrative of misery. It was not a sin against love that had been
committed; it was a sin against the soul; and the sin against the soul
lay in the lack of confession, which becomes the cardinal situation of
the romance solved in the minister's dying acknowledgment. But the love
problem is never solved, just as the hate problem in the physician is
never solved; both Hester and Roger Chillingworth, one with her mystery
of enduring love, the other with his mystery of insatiable hatred, are
left with the issue, the meaning of their lives inexplicable, untold.
Yet it is from the presence of these elements in the story that
something of its intense reality comes.
It remains true, however, that the essential reality lies in the vivid
sense of sin, and its experience in conscience. Hawthorne has not given
a historical view of New England life; such a village, with such a
tragedy, never existed, in that environing forest of the lone seacoast;
but he has symbolized historical New England by an environment that he
created round a tragedy that he read in the human heart, and in this
tragedy itself he was able also to symbolize New England life in its
internal features. One thing stood plainly out in our home
Puritanism,--spirituality; the transcendent sense of the reality of the
soul's life with God, its conscience, its perils, and its eternal issue.
Spirituality remained the inheritance of the New England blood; and
Hawthorne, who was no Puritan in doctrine or sympathy even, was Puritan
in temperament, and hence to him, too, spirituality in life was its main
element. He took that sin of passion which has ever been held typical of
sin against the purity of the soul's nature, and transformed it into the
symbol of all sin, and in its manifestation revolved the aspects of sin
as a presence in the soul after the act,--the broken law disturbing
life's external harmonies but working a worse havoc within, mining all
with corruption there, while it infects with disease whatever approaches
it from without. It is by its moral universality that the romance takes
hold of the imagination; the scarlet letter becomes only a pictorial
incident, but while conscience, repentance, confession, the modes of
punishment, and the modes of absolution remain instant and permanent
facts in the life of the soul, many a human heart will read in this book
as in a manual of its own intimate hours.