effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge
throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and
ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This
warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the
moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of
human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them
from snow-images into men and women. Glancing at the looking-glass, we
behold—deep within its haunted verge—the smouldering glow of the
half-extinguished anthracite, the white moonbeams on the floor, and a
repetition of all the gleam and shadow of the picture, with one remove
further from the actual, and nearer to the imaginative. Then, at such
an hour, and with this scene before him, if a man, sitting all alone,
cannot dream strange things, and make them look like truth, he need
never try to write romances.
But, for myself, during the whole of my Custom-House experience,
moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of firelight, were just alike in
my regard; and neither of them was of one whit more avail than the
twinkle of a tallow-candle. An entire class of susceptibilities, and a
gift connected with them,—of no great richness or value, but the best
I had,—was gone from me.
It is my belief, however, that, had I attempted a different order of
composition, my faculties would not have been found so pointless and
inefficacious. I might, for instance, have contented myself with
writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
Inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention, since
scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and
admiration by his marvellous gifts as a story-teller. Could I have
preserved the picturesque force of his style, and the humorous
coloring which nature taught him how to throw over his descriptions,
the result, I honestly believe, would have been something new in
literature. Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was
a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so
intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age;
or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter,
when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was
broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser
effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through
the opaque substance of to-day, and thus to make it a bright
transparency; to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so
heavily; to seek, resolutely, the true and indestructible value that
lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents, and ordinary
characters, with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The
page of life that was spread out before me seemed dull and
commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A
better book than I shall ever write was there; leaf after leaf
presenting itself to me, just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only because my
brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to transcribe it. At
some future day, it may be, I shall remember a few scattered fragments
and broken paragraphs, and write them down, and find the letters turn
to gold upon the page.
These perceptions have come too late. At the instant, I was only
conscious that what would have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless
toil. There was no occasion to make much moan about this state of
affairs. I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and
essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That
was all. But, nevertheless, it is anything but agreeable to be haunted
by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling,
without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at
every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum. Of the
fact there could be no doubt; and, examining myself and others, I was
led to conclusions, in reference to the effect of public office on the
character, not very favorable to the mode of life in question. In some
other form, perhaps, I may hereafter develop these effects. Suffice it
here to say, that a Custom-House officer, of long continuance, can
hardly be a very praiseworthy or respectable personage, for many
reasons; one of them, the tenure by which he holds his situation, and
another, the very nature of his business, which—though, I trust, an
honest one—is of such a sort that he does not share in the united
effort of mankind.
An effect—which I believe to be observable, more or less, in every
individual who has occupied the position—is, that, while he leans on
the mighty arm of the Republic, his own proper strength departs from
him. He loses, in an extent proportioned to the weakness or force of
his original nature, the capability of self-support. If he possess an
unusual share of native energy, or the enervating magic of place do
not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers may be redeemable.
The ejected officer—fortunate in the unkindly shove that sends him
forth betimes, to struggle amid a struggling world—may return to
himself, and become all that he has ever been. But this seldom
happens. He usually keeps his ground just long enough for his own
ruin, and is then thrust out, with sinews all unstrung, to totter
along the difficult footpath of life as he best may. Conscious of his
own infirmity,—that his tempered steel and elasticity are lost,—he
forever afterwards looks wistfully about him in quest of support
external to himself. His pervading and continual hope—a hallucination
which, in the face of all discouragement, and making light of
impossibilities, haunts him while he lives, and, I fancy, like the
convulsive throes of the cholera, torments him for a brief space after
death—is, that finally, and in no long time, by some happy
coincidence of circumstances, he shall be restored to office. This
faith, more than anything else, steals the pith and availability out
of whatever enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil
and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick himself up out of the
mud, when, in a little while hence, the strong arm of his Uncle will
raise and support him? Why should he work for his living here, or go
to dig gold in California, when he is so soon to be made happy, at
monthly intervals, with a little pile of glittering coin out of his
Uncle’s pocket? It is sadly curious to observe how slight a taste of
office suffices to infect a poor fellow with this singular disease.
Uncle Sam’s gold—meaning no disrespect to the worthy old
gentleman—has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment like that of
the Devil’s wages. Whoever touches it should look well to himself, or
he may find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if not his
soul, yet many of its better attributes; its sturdy force, its courage
and constancy, its truth, its self-reliance, and all that gives the
emphasis to manly character.
Here was a fine prospect in the distance! Not that the Surveyor
brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so
utterly undone, either by continuance in office, or ejectment. Yet my
reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy
and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of
its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had
already accrued to the remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much
longer I could stay in the Custom-House, and yet go forth a man. To
confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension,—as it would never
be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself,
and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign,—it
was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and
decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as
the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official
life that lay before me, finally be with me as it was with this
venerable friend,—to make the dinner-hour the nucleus of the day, and
to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the
sunshine or in the shade? A dreary look-forward this, for a man who
felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the
whole range of his faculties and sensibilities! But, all this while, I
was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated
better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my Surveyorship—to adopt the
tone of “P. P.”—was the election of General Taylor to the Presidency.
It is essential, in order to form a complete estimate of the advantages of
official life, to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile
administration. His position is then one of the most singularly
irksome, and, in every contingency, disagreeable, that a wretched
mortal can possibly occupy; with seldom an alternative of good, on
either hand, although what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a strange experience, to a
man of pride and sensibility, to know that his interests are within
the control of individuals who neither love nor understand him, and by
whom, since one or the other must needs happen, he would rather be
injured than obliged. Strange, too, for one who has kept his calmness
throughout the contest, to observe the blood-thirstiness that is
developed in the hour of triumph, and to be conscious that he is
himself among its objects! There are few uglier traits of human nature
than this tendency—which I now witnessed in men no worse than their
neighbors—to grow cruel, merely because they possessed the power of
inflicting harm. If the guillotine, as applied to office-holders,
were a literal fact instead of one of the most apt of metaphors, it is
my sincere belief that the active members of the victorious party were
sufficiently excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have
thanked Heaven for the opportunity! It appears to me—who have been a
calm and curious observer, as well in victory as defeat—that this
fierce and bitter spirit of malice and revenge has never distinguished
the many triumphs of my own party as it now did that of the Whigs. The
Democrats take the offices, as a general rule, because they need them,
and because the practice of many years has made it the law of
political warfare, which, unless a different system be proclaimed, it
were weakness and cowardice to murmur at. But the long habit of
victory has made them generous. They know how to spare, when they see
occasion; and when they strike, the axe may be sharp, indeed, but its
edge is seldom poisoned with ill-will; nor is it their custom
ignominiously to kick the head which they have just struck off.
In short, unpleasant as was my predicament, at best, I saw much reason
to congratulate myself that I was on the losing side, rather than the
triumphant one. If, heretofore, I had been none of the warmest of
partisans, I began now, at this season of peril and adversity, to be
pretty acutely sensible with which party my predilections lay; nor was
it without something like regret and shame, that, according to a
reasonable calculation of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining
office to be better than those of my Democratic brethren. But who can
see an inch into futurity, beyond his nose? My own head was the first
that fell!
The moment when a man’s head drops off is seldom or never, I am
inclined to think, precisely the most agreeable of his life.
Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes, even so
serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation with it, if
the sufferer will but make the best, rather than the worst, of the
accident which has befallen him. In my particular case, the
consolatory topics were close at hand, and, indeed, had suggested
themselves to my meditations a considerable time before it was
requisite to use them. In view of my previous weariness of office, and
vague thoughts of resignation, my fortune somewhat resembled that of a
person who should entertain an idea of committing suicide, and,
although beyond his hopes, meet with the good hap to be murdered. In
the Custom-House, as before in the Old Manse, I had spent three years;
a term long enough to rest a weary brain; long enough to break off old
intellectual habits, and make room for new ones; long enough, and too
long, to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what was really of no
advantage nor delight to any human being, and withholding myself from
toil that would, at least, have stilled an unquiet impulse in me.
Then, moreover, as regarded his unceremonious ejectment, the late
Surveyor was not altogether ill-pleased to be recognized by the Whigs
as an enemy; since his inactivity in political affairs—his tendency
to roam, at will, in that broad and quiet field where all mankind may
meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow paths where brethren
of the same household must diverge from one another—had sometimes
made it questionable with his brother Democrats whether he was a
friend. Now, after he had won the crown of martyrdom (though with no
longer a head to wear it on), the point might be looked upon as
settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it seemed more decorous to
be overthrown in the downfall of the party with which he had been
content to stand, than to remain a forlorn survivor, when so many
worthier men were falling; and, at last, after subsisting for four
years on the mercy of a hostile administration, to be compelled then
to define his position anew, and claim the yet more humiliating mercy
of a friendly one.
Meanwhile the press had taken up my affair, and kept me, for a week or
two, careering through the public prints, in my decapitated state,
like Irving’s Headless Horseman; ghastly and grim, and longing to be
buried, as a politically dead man ought. So much for my figurative
self. The real human being, all this time, with his head safely on his
shoulders, had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that
everything was for the best; and, making an investment in ink, paper,
and steel-pens, had opened his long-disused writing-desk, and was
again a literary man.
Now it was that the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, Mr.
Surveyor Pue, came into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little
space was requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought
to work upon the tale, with an effect in any degree satisfactory. Even
yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in the task, it
wears, to my eye, a stern and sombre aspect; too much ungladdened by
genial sunshine; too little relieved by the tender and familiar
influences which soften almost every scene of nature and real life,
and, undoubtedly, should soften every picture of them. This
uncaptivating effect is perhaps due to the period of hardly
accomplished revolution, and still seething turmoil, in which the
story shaped itself. It is no indication, however, of a lack of
cheerfulness in the writer’s mind; for he was happier, while straying
through the gloom of these sunless fantasies, than at any time since
he had quitted the Old Manse. Some of the briefer articles, which
contribute to make up the volume, have likewise been written since my
involuntary withdrawal from the toils and honors of public life, and
the remainder are gleaned from annuals and magazines of such antique
date that they have gone round the circle, and come back to novelty
again.[1] Keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine, the
whole may be considered as the POSTHUMOUS PAPERS OF A DECAPITATED
SURVEYOR; and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close, if too
autobiographical for a modest person to publish in his lifetime, will
readily be excused in a gentleman who writes from beyond the grave.
Peace be with all the world! My blessing on my friends! My forgiveness
to my enemies! For I am in the realm of quiet!
[Footnote 1: At the time of writing this article the author
intended to publish, along with “The Scarlet Letter,” several
shorter tales and sketches. These it has been thought
advisable to defer.]
The life of the Custom-House lies like a dream behind me. The old
Inspector,—who, by the by, I regret to say, was overthrown and killed
by a horse, some time ago; else he would certainly have lived
forever,—he, and all those other venerable personages who sat with
him at the receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view; white-headed
and wrinkled images, which my fancy used to sport with, and has now
flung aside forever. The merchants,—Pingree, Phillips, Shepard,
Upton, Kimball, Bertram, Hunt,—these, and many other names, which had
such a classic familiarity for my ear six months ago,—these men of
traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position in the
world,—how little time has it required to disconnect me from them
all, not merely in act, but recollection! It is with an effort that I
recall the figures and appellations of these few. Soon, likewise, my
old native town will loom upon me through the haze of memory, a mist
brooding over and around it; as if it were no portion of the real
earth, but an overgrown village in cloud-land, with only imaginary
inhabitants to people its wooden houses, and walk its homely lanes,
and the unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it
ceases to be a reality of my life. I am a citizen of somewhere else.
My good towns-people will not much regret me; for—though it has been
as dear an object as any, in my literary efforts, to be of some
importance in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory in this
abode and burial-place of so many of my forefathers—_there_ has never
been, for me, the genial atmosphere which a literary man requires, in
order to ripen the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better amongst
other faces; and these familiar ones, it need hardly be said, will do
just as well without me.
It may be, however,—O, transporting and triumphant thought!—that the
great-grandchildren of the present race may sometimes think kindly of
the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of days to come,
among the sites memorable in the town’s history, shall point out the
locality of THE TOWN PUMP!
[Illustration]
[Illustration: The Prison Door]
[Illustration: Vignette,—Wild Rose]
THE SCARLET LETTER.
I.
THE PRISON-DOOR.
[Illustration]
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray,
steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and
others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the
door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron
spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and
happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it
among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the
virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a
prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that
the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house somewhere
in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out
the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his
grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated
sepulchres in the old churchyard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is,
that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town,
the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other
indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its
beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of
its oaken door looked more antique than anything else in the New
World. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known
a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the
wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with
burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which
evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early
borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But on one side
of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild
rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems,
which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to
the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came
forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity
and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history;
but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so
long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally
overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for
believing, it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted Ann
Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door,—we shall not take upon us
to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our
narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal,
we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers, and
present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some
sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the
darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
II.
THE MARKET-PLACE.
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer
morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty
large number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes
intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other
population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the
grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good
people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have
betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted
culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed
the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the
Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably
be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful
child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to
be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a
Quaker, or other heterodox religionist was to be scourged out of the
town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s fire-water
had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into
the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old
Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to
die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same
solemnity of demeanor on the part of the spectators; as befitted a
people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in
whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest
and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable
and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold was the sympathy that a
transgressor might look for, from such bystanders, at the scaffold. On
the other hand, a penalty, which, in our days, would infer a degree of
mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as
stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our
story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in
the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal
infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much
refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of
petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways,
and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into
the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well
as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of
old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants,
separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for,
throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has
transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer
beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less
force and solidity, than her own. The women who were now standing
about the prison-door stood within less than half a century of the
period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether
unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and
the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit
more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright
morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed
busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off
island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of
New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech
among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle
us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume
of tone.