absence, spent in his native town, was the first romance which gave him
world-wide fame. But the intention of beginning to write soon was not
easy of fulfilment in the new surroundings.
"Literature, its exertions and objects, were now of little moment in my
regard," he says, in "The Custom-House." "I cared not at this period for
books; they were apart from me.... A gift, a faculty, if it had not
departed, was suspended and inanimate within me."
Readers of that charming sketch will remember the account of the
author's finding a veritable Puritan scarlet letter in an unfinished
upper room of the public building in which he labored at this time, and
how he was urged by the ghost of a former surveyor, who had written an
account of the badge and its wearer, to make the matter public. The
discovery of these materials is narrated with such reassuring accuracy,
that probably a large number of people still suppose this to have been
the origin of "The Scarlet Letter." But there is no knowledge among
those immediately connected with Hawthorne of any actual relic having
been found; nor, of course, is it likely that anything besides the
manuscript memorandum should have been preserved. But I do not know that
he saw even this. The papers of Mr. Poe were probably a pure invention
of the author's.
A strange coincidence came to light the year after the publication of
the romance. A letter from Leutze, the painter, was printed in the Art
Union Bulletin, running thus:--
"I was struck, when some years ago in the Schwarzwald (in an old
castle), with one picture in the portrait-gallery; it has haunted me
ever since. It was not the beauty or finish that charmed me; it was
something strange in the figures, the immense contrast between the child
and what was supposed to be her gouvernante in the garb of some severe
order; the child, a girl, was said to be the ancestress of the family, a
princess of some foreign land. No sooner had I read 'The Scarlet Letter'
than it burst clearly upon me that the picture could represent no one
else than Hester Prynne and little Pearl. I hurried to see it again, and
found my suppositions corroborated, for the formerly inexplicable
embroidery on the breast of the woman, which I supposed was the token of
her order, assumed the form of the letter; and though partially hidden
by the locks of the girl and the flowers in her hair, I set to work upon
it at once, and made as close a copy of it, with all its quaintness, as
was possible to me, which I shall send you soon. How Hester Prynne ever
came to be painted, I can't imagine; it must certainly have been a freak
of little Pearl. Strange enough, the castle is named Perlenburg, the
Castle of Pearls, or Pearl Castle, as you please."
A more extraordinary incident in its way than this discovery, if it be
trustworthy, could hardly be conceived; but I am not aware that it has
been verified.
The germ of the story in Hawthorne's mind is given below. The name
Pearl, it will be remembered, occurs in the Note-Books, as an original
and isolated suggestion "for a girl, in a story."
In "Endicott and the Red Cross," one of the twice-told series printed
many years before, there is a description of "a young woman, with no
mean share of beauty, whose doom it was to wear the letter A on the
breast of her gown, in the eyes of all the world and her own children.
Sporting with her infamy, the lost and desperate creature had
embroidered the fatal token in scarlet cloth, with golden thread and the
nicest art of needlework." A friend asked Hawthorne if he had
documentary evidence for this particular punishment, and he replied that
he had actually seen it mentioned in the town records of Boston, though
with no attendant details. [Footnote: I may here transcribe, as a further
authority, which Hawthorne may or may not have seen, one of the laws of
Plymouth Colony, enacted in 1658, about the period in which the events
of "The Scarlet Letter" are placed. "It is enacted by the Court and the
Authoritie thereof that whosoeuer shall committ Adultery shal bee
seuerly Punished by whipping two seueral times viz: once whiles the
Court is in being att which they are convicted of the fact, and the
second time as the Court shall order, and likewise to were two Capitall
letters viz: A D cut cut in Cloth and sewed on their vpermost garments
on their arme or backe; and if at any time they shal bee taken without
said letters, whiles they are in the Gou'ment soe worne, to be forthwith
Taken and publicly whipt."] This friend said to another at the time: "We
shall hear of that letter again, for it evidently has made a profound
impression on Hawthorne's mind." Returning to Salem, where his
historical stories and sketches had mainly been written, he reverted
naturally to the old themes; and this one doubtless took possession of
him soon after his entrance on his customs duties. But these disabled
him from following it out at once. When the indefatigable Whigs got hold
of the government again, Hawthorne's literary faculty came into power
also, for he was turned out of office. In the winter of 1849, therefore,
he got to work on his first regular romance. In his Preface to the
"Mosses" he had formally renounced the short story; but "The Scarlet
Letter" proved so highly wrought a tragedy that he had fears of its
effect upon the public, if presented alone.
"In the present case I have some doubts about the expediency, [he wrote
to Mr. Fields, the junior partner of his new publisher, Ticknor,]
because, if the book is made up entirely of 'The Scarlet Letter,' it
will be too sombre. I found it impossible to relieve the shadows of the
story with so much light as I would gladly have thrown in. Keeping so
close to its point as the tale does, and diversified no otherwise than
by turning different sides of the same dark idea to the reader's eye, it
will weary very many people, and disgust some. Is it safe, then, to
stake the book entirely on this one chance?"
His plan was to add some of the pieces afterward printed with the "The
Snow Image," and entitle the whole "Old Time Legends, together with
Sketches Experimental and Ideal." But this was abandoned. On the 4th of
February, 1850, he writes to Bridge:--
"I finished my book only yesterday: one end being in the press at
Boston, while the other was in my head here at Salem; so that, as you
see, the story is at least fourteen miles long....
"My book, the publisher tells me, will not be out before April. He
speaks of it in tremendous terms of approbation; so does Mrs. Hawthorne,
to whom I read the conclusion last night. [Footnote: This recalls an
allusion in the English Note-Books (September 14, 1855): "Speaking of
Thackeray, I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own
pathos, and compare it with my emotions when I read the last scene of
The Scarlet Letter to my wife just after writing it,--tried to read it,
rather, 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."] It broke her heart, and sent her to bed
with a grievous headache,--which I look upon as a triumphant success.
Judging from its effect on her and the publisher, I may calculate on
what bowlers calls a 'ten-strike.' But I do not make any such
calculation."
Now that the author had strongly taken hold of one of the most tangible
and terrible of subjects, the public no longer held back. "The Scarlet
Letter" met with instant acceptance, and the first edition of five
thousand copies was exhausted in ten days. On the old ground of Salem
and in the region of New England history where he had won his first
triumphs, Hawthorne, no longer the centre of a small public, received
the applause of a widespread audience throughout this country, and
speedily in Europe too. His old friend, "The London Athenaeum," received
"The Scarlet Letter" with very high, though careful praise. But at the
same time with this new and wide recognition, an assault was made on the
author which it is quite worth while to record here. This was an article
in "The Church Review" (an Episcopal quarterly published at New Haven),
[Footnote: In the number for January, 1851.] written, I am told, by a
then young man who has since reached a high place in the ecclesiastical
body to which he belongs. The reviewer, in this case, had in a previous
article discussed the question of literary schools in America. Speaking
of the origin of the term "Lake School," he pronounced the epithet
_Lakers_ "the mere blunder of superficial wit and raillery." But
that did not prevent him from creating the absurd title of "Bay
writers," which he applied to all the writers about Boston, baptizing
them in the profane waters of Massachusetts Bay. "The Church Review" was
in the habit of devoting a good deal of its attention to criticism of
the Puritan movement which founded New England. Accordingly, "It is
time," announced this logician, in opening his batteries on Hawthorne,
"that the literary world should learn that Churchmen are, in a very
large proportion, their readers and book-buyers, and that the tastes and
principles of Churchmen have as good a right to be respected as those of
Puritans and Socialists." Yet, inconsistently enough, he declared that
Bay writers could not have grown to the stature of authors at all,
unless they had first shaken off the Puritan religion, and adopted "a
religion of indifference and unbelief." Thus, though attacking them as
Puritans and Socialists (this phrase was aimed at Brook Farm), he denied
that they were Puritans at all. Clear understanding of anything from a
writer with so much of the boomerang in his mind was not to be expected.
But neither would one easily guess the revolting vulgarity with which he
was about to view "The Scarlet Letter." He could discover in it nothing
but a deliberate attempt to attract readers by pandering to the basest
taste. He imagines that Hawthorne "selects the intrigue of an adulterous
minister, as the groundwork of his ideal" of Puritan times, and asks,
"Is the French era actually begun in our literature?" Yet, being in some
points, or professing to be, an admirer of the author, "We are glad," he
says, "that 'The Scarlet Letter' is, after all, little more than an
experiment, and need not be regarded as a step necessarily fatal." And
in order to save Mr. Hawthorne, and stem the tide of corruption, he is
willing to point out his error. Nevertheless, he is somewhat at a loss
to know where to puncture the heart of the offence, for "there is a
provoking concealment of the author's motive," he confesses, "from the
beginning to the end of the story. We wonder what he would be at:
whether he is making fun of all religion, or only giving a fair hint of
the essential sensualism of enthusiasm. But, in short, we are astonished
at the kind of incident he has selected for romance." The phraseology,
he finds, is not offensive: but this is eminently diabolical, for "the
romance never hints the shocking words that belong to its things, but,
like Mephistopheles, hints that the arch-fiend himself is a very
tolerable sort of person, if nobody would call him Mr. Devil." Where,
within the covers of the book, could the deluded man have found this
doctrine urged? Only once, faintly, and then in the words of one of the
chief sinners.
"Shelley himself," says the austere critic, airing his literature,
"never imagined a more dissolute conversation than that in which the
polluted minister comforts himself with the thought, that the revenge of
the injured husband is worse than his own sin in instigating it. 'Thou
and I never did so, Hester,' he suggests; and she responds, 'Never,
never! What we did had a consecration of its own.'"
And these wretched and distorted consolations of two erring and
condemned souls, the righteous Churchman, with not very commendable
taste, seizes upon as the moral of the book, leaving aside the terrible
retribution which overtakes and blasts them so soon after their vain
plan of flight and happiness. Not for a moment does Hawthorne defend
their excuses for themselves. Of Hester:--
"Shame, Despair, Solitude! These [he says] had been her teachers,--stern
and wild ones,--and they had made her strong, but taught her much
amiss."
And what she urges on behalf of herself and Dimmesdale must, of course,
by any pure-minded reader, be included among the errors thus taken into
her mind.
"The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;
although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of
the most sacred of them.... Were such a man once more to fall, what plea
could be urged in extenuation of his crime? _None_; unless it avail
him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and exquisite suffering;
that his mind was darkened and confused by the very remorse which
harrowed it."
But that these partial excuses are futile, the writer goes on to show,
in this solemn declaration:--
"And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has
once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired.
It may be watched and guarded.... But there is still the ruined wall,
and near it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his
unforgotten triumph."
How Mr. Dimmesdale yielded to this stealthy foe is then described; but
it is also shown how Roger Chillingworth, the personified retribution of
the two sinners, fastens himself to them in all their movements, and
will be with them in any flight, however distant.
"'Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,' said he, looking darkly at
the clergyman, 'there was no one place so secret, no high place nor
lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me.'"
And it was precisely because Hawthorne would leave no specious turn of
the hypocrisy of sin unrevealed, that he carried us through this
delusive mutual consolation of the guilty pair, and showed us their
empty hope, founded on wrong-doing, powdered to dust at the moment of
fulfilment.
But the reverend critic, by some dark and prurient affinity of his
imagination, saw nothing of the awful truths so clearly though briefly
expressed, and finally came to the conclusion that the moral of the
whole fiction was "that the Gospel has not set the relations of man and
woman where they should be, and that a new gospel is needed to supersede
the Seventh Commandment, and the bond of matrimony."
"The lady's frailty, [writes the reviewer,] is philosophized into a
natural and necessary result of the Scriptural law of marriage, which by
holding her irrevocably to her vows, as plighted to a dried-up old
book-worm, ... is viewed as making her heart an easy victim.... The sin
of her seducer, too, seems to be considered as lying, not so much in the
deed itself, as in his long concealment of it; and in fact the whole
moral of the tale is given in the words, 'Be true, he true!' as if
sincerity in sin were a virtue, and as if 'Be clean, he clean!' were not
the more fitting conclusion."
But this moral of cleanliness was one so obvious that Hawthorne probably
never dreamed of any one's requiring it to be emphasized. In fact, it is
the starting-point, the very foundation, of the tragedy. The tale is a
massive argument for repentance, which is the flinging aside of
concealment, and the open and truthful acknowledgment of sin. In the
Puritan mode of dealing with sin, Hawthorne found the whole problem of
repentance and confession presented in the most drastic, concentrated,
and startling form; for the Puritans carried out in the severest style a
practical illustration of the consequences of moral offence. Since men
and women would not voluntarily continue in active remorse and public
admission of wrong-doing, these governors and priests determined to try
the effect of visible symbols in keeping the conscience alive. People
were set before the public gaze, in the stocks, whipped in public at the
whipping-post, and imprisoned in the pillory. Malefactors had their ears
cropped; scolding women had to wear a forked twig on the tongue; other
criminals to carry a halter constantly around the neck. But that this
was only a hellish device, after all; that the inflictors of such
punishment were arrogating too much to themselves, and shared the office
of the fiend; that, moreover, this compulsion of a dumb outward
truthfulness would never build up the real inner truth of the soul;--all
this Hawthorne perceived and endeavored to portray in a form which
should be as a parable, applying its morality to the men and women of
to-day, all the more persuasively because of its indirectness. As a
study of a system of social discipline never before so expounded, it
claimed the deepest attention. And never was the capacity of sinning men
and women for self-delusion more wonderfully illustrated than in this
romance. The only avenue of escape from such delusion was shown to be
self-analysis; that is, the conscientious view of one's self which keeps
the right or wrong of one's conduct always clearly visible. Hester was
on the whole the truest of the three persons in the drama, and the
advantages of this comparative trueness are constantly made manifest.
She in a measure conquers evil and partly atones for her wrong, by the
good which she is able to do among her fellow-beings,--as much
compensation as can rightfully be hoped for a woman who has once been so
essentially corrupted as she. Dimmesdale, too, retains so much of native
truth that he never allows his conscience to slumber for a moment, and
plies the scourge of remorse upon himself continually. To this extent he
is better than Chillingworth, who, in order to take into his own hands
the retribution that belongs to Heaven, deliberately adopts falsity for
his guide, and becomes a monster of deceit, taking a wicked joy in that
which ought to have awakened an endless, piteous horror in him instead,
and have led to new contemplation and study of virtue. But Dimmesdale,
though not coolly and maliciously false, stops short of open confession,
and in this submits himself to the most occult and corrosive influence
of his own sin. For him, the single righteousness possible consisted in
abject acknowledgment. Once announcing that he had fallen, and was
unworthy, he might have taken his place on the lower moral plane; and,
equally resigning the hope of public honor and of happiness with Hester,
he could have lent his crippled energies to the doing of some limited
good. The shock to the general belief in probity would have been great;
but the discovery that the worst had been made known, that the minister
was strong enough to condemn himself, and descend from the place he no
longer was fit for, would have restored the public mind again, by
showing it that a deeper probity possible than that which it wanted to
see sustained. This is the lesson of the tragedy, that nothing is so
destructive as the morality of mere appearances. Not that sincerity in
sin is a virtue, but that it is better than sin and falsehood combined.
And if anything were wanting, at first, to make this clear, there
certainly is not a particle of obscurity left by the glare of the
catastrophe, when the clergyman rejects Hester's hope that he and she
may meet after death, and spend their immortal life together, and says
that God has proved his mercy most of all by the afflictions he has laid
upon him.
As to the new truth which Hester hoped would be revealed, it could have
been no other than that ultimate lifting up of the race into a plane of
the utmost human truthfulness, which every one who believes in the
working of all things for good, looks forward to with vague longing, but
with most certain faith. How far the Puritan organization was from this
state of applied truth, the romance shows. Nearly every note in the
range of Puritan sympathies is touched by the poet, as he goes on. The
still unspoiled tenderness of the young matron who cannot but feel
something of mercifulness toward Hester is overruled by the harsh
exultation of other women in her open shame. We have the noble and
spotless character of Winthrop dimly suggested by the mention of his
death on the night of Dimmesdale's vigil at the pillory; but much more
distinct appears the mild and saintly Wilson, who, nevertheless, is
utterly incompetent to deal with the problem of a woman's lost morality.
Governor Bellingham is the stern, unflinching, manly upholder of the
state and its ferocious sanctions; yet in the very house with him dwells
Mistress Hibbins, the witch-lady, revelling in the secret knowledge of
widespread sin. Thus we are led to a fuller comprehension of
Chillingworth's attitude as an exponent of the whole Puritan idea of
spiritual government; and in his diabolical absorption and gloating
interest in sin, we behold an exaggerated--but logically
exaggerated--spectre of the Puritan attempt to precipitate and
personally supervise the punishments of eternity on this side of death.
Dr. George B. Loring, of Salem, wrote at the time an excellent reply to
this article in "The Church Review," though he recognized, as all
readers of general intelligence must, that the author of it did not by
any means represent the real enlightenment of the clergy and laity for
whom he undertook to be a mouthpiece.
Considered as a work of art, "The Scarlet Letter" is perhaps not so
excellent as the author's subsequent books. It may not unjustly
be called a novel without a plot, so far as this touches the
adroit succession of incidents and the interdependence of parts, which
we call "plot." Passion and motive and character, having been brought
together in given relations, begin to work toward a logical issue; but
the individual chapters stand before us rather as isolated pictures,
with intervals between, than as the closely conjoined links of a drama
gathering momentum as it grows. There is succession and acceleration,
indeed, in the movement of the story, but this is not quite so evident
as is the hand which checks each portion and holds it perfectly still,
long enough to describe it completely. The author does not, like a
playwright, reflect the action swiftly while it passes, but rather
arrests it and studies it, then lets it go by. It may be that this is
simply the distinction between the dramatist's and the novelist's
method; but probably we must allow it to be something more than that,
and must attribute it to the peculiar leisure which qualifies all
Hawthorne's fictions, at times enhancing their effect, but also
protracting the impression a little too much, at times. Yet the general
conception, and the mode of drawing out the story and of illustrating
the characters, is dramatic in a high degree. The author's exegesis of
the moods of his persons is brief, suggestive, restrained; and,
notwithstanding the weight of moral meaning which the whole work
carries, it is impossible to determine how much the movement of events
is affected by his own will, or by that imperious perception of the
necessary outcome of certain passions and temperaments, which influences
novelists of the higher order.
As a demonstration of power, it seems to me that this first extended
romance was not outdone by its successors; yet there is a harshness in
its tone, a want of mitigation, which causes it to strike crudely on the
aesthetic sense by comparison with those mellower productions. This was
no doubt fortunate for its immediate success. Hawthorne's faith in pure
beauty was so absolute as to erect at first a barrier between himself
and the less devout reading public. If in his earlier tales he had not
so transfused tragedy with the suave repleteness of his sense of beauty,
he might have snatched a speedier popular recognition. It is curious to
speculate what might have been the result, had he written "The House of
the Seven Gables" before "The Scarlet Letter." Deep as is the tragic
element in the former, it seems quite likely that its greater gentleness
of incident and happier tone would have kept the world from discovering
the writer's real measure, for a while longer. But "The Scarlet Letter"
burst with such force close to its ears, that the indolent public awoke
in good earnest, and never forgot, though it speedily forgave the shock.