I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or
after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from
Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the
quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the
memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem
I cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and
suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more
of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop,
with the sheriff’s return of execution upon it, which I found at the
Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the
cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could
have got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to
have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where
the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant
remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no
need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of
red in my memory.
The kind old ship’s captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured
to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African
coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed
me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface
to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my
enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in
Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt
the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had
given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own
flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady
say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it
seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of
love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him.
Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his
native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to any
place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so
doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the
birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhaps
only the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York and
Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable
perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities,
which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal
susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art. I
dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest
name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem
in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there
to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the first
time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most
characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact of
a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had been
passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the
conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full
of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically
ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed
that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia,
where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found
myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names
pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much
their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names were all strange,
and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a
tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in
quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as
an actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no
Westerner can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do
not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then; I
think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study
of the local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even for
literary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the
first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or
than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to
the tree that stood
“Auf brennender Felsenwand.”
Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only
suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold
height, I am in doubt to this day.
I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities
than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest
publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of
publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical
of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and
factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their
mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the
effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon
their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of
their special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell
the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that
they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions
of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found
me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or
Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their
unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious engines,
or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long
as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in Canada that
I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their Evangeline hats and
kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached
Portland my troubles began. I went with that young minister of whom I
have spoken to a large foundry, where they were casting some sort of
ironmongery, and inspected the process from a distance beyond any chance
spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly uncertain of putting the
rather fine spectacle to any practical use. A manufactory where they did
something with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first time called
kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to myself that probably all
the other industries of Portland were as reserved, and I would not seek
to explore them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred again.
If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and
inspect their processes? This was a question which would not answer
itself to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I could
see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a little way
from Boston that I could readily run up there, if I did not wish to
examine the shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I would run up
from Boston, but in order to do this I must first go to Boston.