Why, the degenerate fellow might as
well have been a fiddler!
well have been a fiddler!
Warner - World's Best Literature - v12 - Gre to Hen
Me want her to p'ay wiz!
"
And with this, and with the tears streaming down his cheeks,
poor Archie toddled forward with the uncertain step and out-
stretched arms of a little child. But Kate had already gained
the door, and was running screaming across the next room, and
so down the long corridor.
Poor Archie toddled after, his baby heart filled with mourn-
ing for the brindled cat that had been buried in the back garden
seven years before. - Seven years? or was it only yesterday?
## p. 7052 (#447) ###########################################
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## p. 7053 (#451) ###########################################
7053
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
(1804-1864)
BY HENRY JAMES
T IS perhaps an advantage in writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne's
work, that his life offers little opportunity to the biographer.
The record of it makes so few exactions that in a critical
account of him- even as brief as this-the work may easily take
most of the place. He was one of those happy men of letters in
whose course the great milestones are simply those of his ideas that
found successful form. Born at Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4th,
1804, of established local Puritan -and in a conspicuous degree,
sturdy seafaring-stock, he was educated at his birthplace and at
Bowdoin College, Maine, where H. W. Longfellow was one of his
fellow-students. Another was Franklin Pierce, who was to be elected
President of the United States in 1852, and with whom Hawthorne
formed relations that became an influence in his life. On leaving
college in 1825 he returned to Salem to live, and in 1828 published
in Boston a short romance called 'Fanshawe,' of which the scene, in
spite of its being a "love story," is laid, but for a change of name,
at Bowdoin, with professors and undergraduates for its male charac-
ters. The experiment was inevitably faint, but the author's beautiful
touch had begun to feel its way. In 1837, after a dozen years spent
in special solitude, as he later testified, at Salem, he collected as the
first series of 'Twice-Told Tales' various more or less unremunerated
contributions to the magazines and annuals of the day. In 1845 ap-
peared the second series, and in 1851 the two volumes were, with a
preface peculiarly graceful and touching, reissued together; he is in
general never more graceful than when prefatory. In 1851 and 1854
respectively came to light The Snow Image' and 'Mosses from an
Old Manse,' which form, with the previous double sheaf, his three
main gatherings-in of the shorter fiction. I neglect, for brevity and
as addressed to children, Grandfather's Chair' and 'The Wonder
Book' (1851), as well as Tanglewood Tales' (1852). Of the other
groups, some preceded, some followed, the appearance in 1850 of his
second novel, The Scarlet Letter. '
These things—the experiments in the shorter fiction — had sounded,
with their rare felicity, from the very first the note that was to be
Hawthorne's distinguished mark,- that feeling for the latent romance
## p. 7054 (#452) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7054
of New England, which in summary form is the most final name to
be given, I think, to his inspiration. This element, which is what at
its best his genius most expresses, was far from obvious, it had to
be looked for; and Hawthorne found it, as he wandered and mused,
in the secret play of the Puritan faith: the secret, I say particularly,
because the direct and ostensible, face to face with common tasks
and small conditions (as I may call them without prejudice to their
general grimness), arrived at forms of which the tender imagination
could make little. It could make a great deal, on the other hand, of
the spiritual contortions, the darkened outlook, of the ingrained sense
of sin, of evil, and of responsibility. There had been other complica-
tions in the history of the community surrounding him,- savages
from behind, soldiers from before, a cruel climate from every quarter
and a pecuniary remittance from none. But the great complication
was the pressing moral anxiety, the restless individual conscience.
These things were developed at the cost of so many others, that
there were almost no others left to help them to make a picture for
the artist. The artist's imagination had to deck out the subject, to
work it up, as we nowadays say; and Hawthorne's was,- —on intensely
chastened lines, indeed,-equal to the task. In that manner it came
into exercise from the first, through the necessity of taking for
granted, on the part of the society about him, a life of the spirit
more complex than anything that met the mere eye of sense. It was
a question of looking behind and beneath for the suggestive idea, the
artistic motive; the effect of all of which was an invaluable training
for the faculty that evokes and enhances. This ingenuity grew alert
and irrepressible as it manoeuvred for the back view and turned up
the under side of common aspects, - the laws secretly broken, the
impulses secretly felt, the hidden passions, the double lives, the dark
corners, the closed rooms, the skeletons in the cupboard and at the
feast. It made, in short, and cherished, for fancy's sake, a mystery
and a glamour where there were otherwise none very ready to its
hand; so that it ended by living in a world of things symbolic and
allegoric, a presentation of objects casting, in every case, far behind
them a shadow more curious and more amusing than the apparent
figure. Any figure therefore easily became with him an emblem,
any story a parable, any appearance a cover: things with which his
concern is gently, indulgently, skillfully, with the lightest hand in
the world-to pivot them round and show the odd little stamp or
sign that gives them their value for the collector.
The specimens he collected, as we may call them, are divisible
into groups, but with the mark in common that they are all early
products of the dry New England air. Some are myths and mys-
teries of old Massachusetts,- charming ghostly passages of colonial
-
## p. 7055 (#453) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7055
history. Such are 'The Grey Champion,' 'The Maypole of Merry
Mount,' the four beautiful Legends of the Province House. ' Others,
like 'Roger Malvin's Burial,' 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' 'Young Good-
man Brown,' are "moralities" without the moral, as it were; small
cold apologues, frosty and exquisite, occasionally gathered from be-
yond the sea. Then there are the chapters of the fanciful all for
fancy's sake, of the pure whimsical, and of observation merely
amused and beguiled; pages, many of them, of friendly humorous
reflections on what, in Salem or in Boston, a dreamer might meet in
his walks. What Hawthorne encountered he instinctively embroi-
dered, working it over with a fine, slow needle, and with flowers
pale, rosy, or dusky, as the case might suggest. We have a handful
of these in The Great Carbuncle' and 'The Great Stone Face,'
'The Seven Vagabonds,' 'The Threefold Destiny,' 'The Village
Uncle,' 'The Toll Gatherer's Day,' 'A Rill from the Town Pump,'
and 'Chippings with a Chisel. ' The inequalities in his work are not,
to my sense, great; and in specifying, we take and leave with hesi-
tation.
'The Scarlet Letter,' in 1850, brought him immediate distinction,
and has probably kept its place not only as the most original of his
novels, but as the most distinguished piece of prose fiction that was
to spring from American soil. He had received in 1839 an appoint-
ment to a small place in the Boston custom-house, where his labors
were sordid and sterile, and he had given it up in permissible weari-
ness. He had spent in 1841 near Roxbury, Massachusetts, a few
months in the co-operative community of Brook Farm, a short-lived
socialistic experiment. He had married in the following year and
gone to live at the old Manse at Concord, where he remained till
1846, when, with a fresh fiscal engagement, he returned to his native
town. It was in the intervals of his occupation at the Salem custom-
house that The Scarlet Letter' was written. The book has achieved
the fortune of the small supreme group of novels: it has hung an
ineffaceable image in the portrait gallery, the reserved inner cabinet,
of literature. Hester Prynne is not one of those characters of fiction
whom we use as a term of comparison for a character of fact: she is
almost more than that,- she decorates the museum in a way that
seems to forbid us such a freedom. Hawthorne availed himself, for
her history, of the most striking anecdote the early Puritan chronicle
could give him,—give him in the manner set forth by the long, lazy
Prologue or Introduction, an exquisite commemoration of the happy
dullness of his term of service at the custom-house, where it is his
fancy to pretend to have discovered in a box of old papers the faded
relic and the musty documents which suggested to him his title and
his theme.
## p. 7056 (#454) ###########################################
7056
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
It is the story as old as the custom of marriage, - the story of
the husband, the wife, and the lover; but bathed in a misty, moon-
shiny light, and completely neglecting the usual sources of emotion.
The wife, with the charming child of her guilt, has stood under the
stern inquisitorial law in the public pillory of the adulteress; while
the lover, a saintly young minister, undetected and unbetrayed, has
in an anguish of pusillanimity suffered her to pay the whole fine.
The husband, an ancient scholar, a man of abstruse and profane
learning, finds his revenge years after the wrong, in making himself
insidiously the intimate of the young minister, and feeding secretly on
the remorse, the inward torments, which he does everything to
quicken but pretends to have no ground for suspecting. The march
of the drama lies almost wholly in the malignant pressure exercised
in this manner by Chillingworth upon Dimmesdale; an influence that
at last reaches its climax in the extraordinary penance of the sub-
ject, who in the darkness, in the sleeping town, mounts, himself,
upon the scaffold on which, years before, the partner of his guilt has
undergone irrevocable anguish. In this situation he calls to him
Hester Prynne and her child, who, belated in the course of the merci-
ful ministrations to which Hester has now given herself up, pass,
among the shadows, within sight of him; and they in response to his
appeal ascend for a second time to the place of atonement, and
stand there with him under cover of night. The scene is not com-
plete, of course, till Chillingworth arrives to enjoy the spectacle and
his triumph. It has inevitably gained great praise, and no page of
Hawthorne's shows more intensity of imagination; yet the main
achievement of the book is not what is principally its subject,— the
picture of the relation of the two men. They are too faintly — the
husband in particular - though so fancifully figured. The Scarlet
Letter' lives, in spite of too many cold concetti,- Hawthorne's general
danger,- by something noble and truthful in the image of the
branded mother and the beautiful child. Strangely enough, this pair
are almost wholly outside the action; yet they preserve and vivify
the work. '
'The House of the Seven Gables,' written during a residence of
two years at Lenox, Massachusetts, was published in 1851. If there
are probably no four books of any author among which, for a favor-
ite, readers hesitate longer than between Hawthorne's four longest
stories, there are at any rate many for whom this remains distinctly
his largest and fullest production. Suffused as it is with a pleasant
autumnal haze, it yet brushes more closely than its companions the
surface of American life, comes a trifle nearer to being a novel of
manners. The manners it shows us indeed are all interfused with
the author's special tone, seen in a slanting afternoon light; but
## p. 7057 (#455) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7057
detail and illustration are sufficiently copious; and I am tempted for
my own part to pronounce the book, taking subject and treatment
together, and in spite of the position as a more concentrated classic
enjoyed by The Scarlet Letter,' the closest approach we are likely
to have to the great work of fiction, so often called for, that is to
do us nationally most honor and most good. The subject reduced
to its essence, indeed, accounts not quite altogether for all that there
is in the picture. What there is besides is an extraordinary charm of
expression, of sensibility, of humor, of touch. The question is that
of the mortal shrinkage of a family once uplifted, the last spasm of
their starved gentility and flicker of their slow extinction. In the
haunted world of Hawthorne's imagination the old Pyncheon house,
under its elm in the Salem by-street, is the place where the ghosts
are most at home. Ghostly even are its actual tenants, the ancient
virgin Hepzibah, with her turban, her scowl, her creaking joints, and
her map of the great territory to the eastward belonging to her
family, reduced, in these dignities, to selling profitless pennyworths
over a counter; and the bewildered bachelor Clifford, released, like
some blinking and noble déterré of the old Bastile, from twenty
years of wrongful imprisonment. We meet at every turn, with Haw-
thorne, his favorite fancy of communicated sorrows and inevitable
atonements. Life is an experience in which we expiate the sins of
others in the intervals of expiating our own. The heaviest visitation
of the blighted Pyncheons is the responsibility they have incurred
through the misdeeds of a hard-hearted witch-burning ancestor. This
ancestor has an effective return to life in the person of the one actu-
ally robust and successful representative of the race, - a bland, hard,
showy, shallow "ornament of the bench," a massive hypocrite and
sensualist, who at last, though indeed too late, pays the penalty and
removes the curse. The idea of the story is at once perhaps a trifle
thin and a trifle obvious,—the idea that races and individuals may
die of mere dignity and heredity, and that they need for refreshment
and cleansing to be, from without, breathed upon like dull mirrors.
But the art of the thing is exquisite, its charm irresistible, its dis-
tinction complete. The House of the Seven Gables,' I may add, con-
tains in the rich portrait of Judge Pyncheon a character more solidly
suggested than—with the possible exception of the Zenobia of 'The
Blithedale Romance - any other figure in the author's list.
―
Weary of Lenox, Hawthorne spent several months of 1852 at West
Newton near Boston, where The Blithedale Romance' was brought
forth. He made the most, for the food of fancy, of what came
under his hand, happy in an appetite that could often find a feast
in meagre materials. The third of his novels is an echo, delightfully
poetized, of his residence at Brook Farm. "Transcendentalism" was
XII-442
## p. 7058 (#456) ###########################################
7058
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
in those days in New England much in the air; and the most com-
prehensive account of the partakers of this quaint experiment appears
to have been held to be that they were Transcendentalists. More sim-
ply stated, they were young, candid radicals, reformers, philanthro-
pists. The fact that it sprang-all irresponsibly indeed-from the
observation of a known episode, gives 'The Blithedale Romance' also
a certain value as a picture of manners; the place portrayed, how-
ever, opens quickly enough into the pleasantest and idlest dream-
world. Hawthorne, we gather, dreamed there more than he worked;
he has traced his attitude delightfully in that of the fitful and iron-
ical Coverdale, as to whom we wonder why he chose to rub shoul-
ders quite so much. We think of him as drowsing on a hillside with
his hat pulled over his eyes, and the neighboring hum of reform
turning in his ears, to a refrain as vague as an old song. One
thing is certain: that if he failed his companions as a laborer in the
field, it was only that he might associate them with another sort of
success.
We feel, however, that he lets them off easily, when we think of
some of the queer figures and queer nostrums then abroad in the
land, and which his mild satire - incurring none the less some mild
reproach fails to grind in its mill. The idea that he most tangibly
presents is that of the unconscious way in which the search for the
common good may cover a hundred interested impulses and personal
motives; the suggestion that such a company could only be bound
together more by its delusions, its mutual suspicions and frictions,
than by any successful surrender of self. The book contains two
images of large and admirable intention: that of Hollingsworth the
heavy-handed radical, selfish and sincere, with no sense for jokes,
for forms, or for shades; and that of Zenobia the woman of "sym-
pathies," the passionate patroness of "causes," who plays as it were
with revolution, and only encounters embarrassment. Zenobia is the
most graceful of all portraits of the strong-minded of her sex; bor-
rowing something of her grace, moreover, from the fate that was not
to allow her to grow old and shrill, and not least touching from the
air we attribute to her of looking, with her fine imagination, for ad-
ventures that were hardly, under the circumstances, to be met. We
fill out the figure, perhaps, and even lend to the vision something
more than Hawthorne intended. Zenobia was, like Coverdale him-
self, a subject of dreams that were not to find form at Roxbury; but
Coverdale had other resources, while she had none but her final fail-
ure. Hawthorne indicates no more interesting aspect of the matter
than her baffled effort to make a hero of Hollingsworth, who proves,
to her misfortune, so much too inelastic for the part. All this, as
we read it to-day, has a soft, shy glamour, a touch of the poetry of
## p. 7059 (#457) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7059
far-off things. Nothing of the author's is a happier expression of
what I have called his sense of the romance of New England.
In 1853 Franklin Pierce, then President, appointed him consul at
Liverpool, which was the beginning of a residence of some seven
years in England and in Italy, the period to which we owe The
Marble Faun' and 'Our Old Home. ' The material for the latter of
these was the first to be gathered; but the appearance of The Mar-
ble Faun,' begun in Rome in 1858 and finished during a second stay
in England, preceded that of its companion. This is his only long
drama on a foreign stage. Drawn from his own air, however, are
much of its inspiration and its character. Hawthorne took with him
to Italy, as he had done to England, more of the old Puritan con-
sciousness than he left behind. The book has been consecrated as a
kind of manual of Roman sights and impressions, brought together
indeed in the light of a sympathy always detached and often with-
held; and its value is not diminished by its constant reference to an
order of things of which, at present, the yearning pilgrim - before a
board for the most part swept bare- -can only pick up the crumbs.
The mystical, the mythical, are in The Marble Faun' more than
ever at hide-and-seek with the real. The author's fancy for freakish
correspondences has its way, with Donatello's points of resemblance
to the delightful statue in the Capitol. What he offers us is the
history of a character blissfully immature, awakening to manhood
through the accidental, the almost unconscious, commission of a crime.
For the happy youth before his act-the first complete act of his
life- there have been no unanswered questions; but after it he finds
himself confronted with all the weary questions of the world. This
act consists of his ridding of an obscure tormentor-the obscurity is
rather a mistake-a woman whom he loves, and who is older,
cleverer, and more acquainted with life than himself. The humaniz-
ing, the moralizing of the faun is again an ingenious conceit; but it
has had for result to have made the subject of the process - and the
case is unique in Hawthorne's work-one of those creations of the
story-teller who give us a name for a type. There is a kind of young
man whom we have now only to call a Donatello, to feel that we suf-
ficiently classify him. It is a part of the scheme of the story to
extend to still another nature than his the same sad initiation. A
young woman from across the Atlantic, a gentle copyist in Roman
galleries of still gentler Guidos and Guercinos, happens to have caught
a glimpse, at the critical moment, of the dismal secret that unites
Donatello and Miriam. This, for her, is the tree of bitter knowledge,
the taste of which sickens and saddens her. The burden is more
than she can bear, and one of the most charming passages in the
book describes how at last, at a summer's end, in sultry solitude, she
## p. 7060 (#458) ###########################################
7060
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
stops at St. Peter's before a confessional, and Protestant and Puritan
as she is, yields to the necessity of kneeling there and ridding herself
of her obsession. Hawthorne's young women are exquisite; Hilda is
a happy sister to the Phoebe of 'The House of the Seven Gables'
and the Priscilla of The Blithedale Romance. '
The drama in The Marble Faun' none the less, I think, is of an
effect less complete than that of the almost larger element that I
can only call the landscape and the spirit. Nothing is more striking
than the awkward grace with which the author utters, without con-
senting to it, for he is full of half-amiable, half-angry protest and
prejudice, the message, the mystery of the medium in which his
actors move. Miriam and her muffled bandit have faded away, and
we have our doubts and even our fears about Kenyon and his Ameri-
can statuary; but the breath of old Rome, the sense of old Italy, still
meet us as we turn the page, and the book will long, on the great
sentimental journey, continue to peep out of most pockets.
He returned to America in 1860, settled once more at Concord,
and died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the arms of Franklin
Pierce, in 1864. At home, with the aid of many memories and of
the copious diaries ultimately published by his wife and children, he
brought forth, one by one, the chapters eventually collected under
the title of Our Old Home. ' The American 'Note Books,' the Eng-
lish, and the French and Italian, were given to the world after his
death,— in 1868, 1870, and 1871 respectively; and if I add to these the
small "campaign" (Life of Franklin Pierce' (1852), two posthumous
fragments, 'Septimius Felton' and 'The Dolliver Romance,' and those
scraps and shreds of which his table drawers were still more exhaust-
ively emptied, his literary catalogue - none of the longest - becomes
complete.
The important item in this remainder is the close, ripe cluster,
the series presented by himself, of his impressions of England. These
admirable papers, with much of the same fascination, have something
of the same uncomforted note with which he had surrendered him-
self to the charm of Italy: the mixture of sensibility and reluctance,
of response and dissent, the strife between his sense of beauty and
his sense of banishment. He came to the Old World late in life-
though after dabbling for years, indeed, in the fancied phenomena of
time, and with inevitable reserves, mistrusts, and antagonisms. The
striking thing to my sense, however, is not what he missed but what
he so ingeniously and vividly made out. If he had been, imagina-
tively, rather old in his youth, he was youthful in his age; and when
all is said, we owe him, as a contribution to the immemorial pro-
cess of lively repartee between the mother land and the daughter,
the only pages of the business that can be said to belong to pure
## p. 7061 (#459) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7061
literature. He was capable of writing 'The Marble Faun,' and yet of
declaring, in a letter from Rome, that he bitterly detested the place
and should rejoice to bid it farewell for ever. Just so he was capa-
ble of drawing from English aspects a delight that they had yielded
not even to Washington Irving, and yet of insisting, with a perver-
sity that both smiled and frowned, that they rubbed him mainly all
the wrong way. At home he had fingered the musty, but abroad
he seemed to pine for freshness. In truth, for many persons his
great, his most touching sign will have been his aloofness wherever
he is. He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is
an æsthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing
that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
It was
a faculty that gave him much more a terrible sense of human abysses
than a desire rashly to sound them and rise to the surface with
his report. On the surface- the surface of the soul and the edge of
the tragedy he preferred to remain. He lingered, to weave his
web, in the thin exterior air. This is a partial expression of his
characteristic habit of dipping, of diving just for sport, into the
moral world without being in the least a moralist. He had none of
the heat nor of the dogmatism of that character; none of the imper-
tinence, as we feel he would almost have held it, of any intermed-
dling. He never intermeddled; he was divertedly and discreetly
contemplative, pausing oftenest wherever, amid prosaic aspects, there
seemed most of an appeal to a sense for subtleties. But of all cynics
he was the brightest and kindest, and the subtleties he spun are
mere silken threads for stringing polished beads. His collection of
moral mysteries is the cabinet of a dilettante.
Huy Jammer
[All the following selections from Hawthorne's works are made from the
authorized editions, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , Boston, and
are reprinted by their permission. ]
SALEM AND THE HAWTHORNES
From The Scarlet Letter>
TH
HIS old town of Salem-my native place, though I have dwelt
much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years-
possesses or did possess a hold on my affections, the force
of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual
## p. 7062 (#460) ###########################################
7062
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is con-
cerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden
houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty; its
irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only
tame; its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through
the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New
Guinea at one end and a view of the almshouse at the other,-
such being the features of my native town, it would be quite
as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere,
there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which in lack of a
better phrase I must be content to call affection. The sentiment
is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my fam-
ily has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and
a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my
name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settle-
ment which has since become a city. And here his descendants
have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly sub-
stance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily
be akin to the mortal frame wherewith for a little while I walk
the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of
is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.
Few of my
countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation
is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to
know.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure
of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and
dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far
back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort
of home feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in refer-
ence to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger
claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded,
sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor,-who came so early,
with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with
such a stately port, and made so large a figure as a man of war
and peace, a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is
seldom heard and my face hardly known.
He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the
Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter
persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him.
in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity
towards a woman of their sect which will last longer, it is to be
――――――
## p. 7063 (#461) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7063
feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were
many. His son too inherited the persecuting spirit, and made
himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches that their
blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep
a stain indeed that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-
ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to
dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought
themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruel-
ties, or whether they are now groaning under the heavy conse-
quences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I the
present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon
myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them
-as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition
of the race for many a long year back would argue to exist -
may be now and henceforth removed.
Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed
Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for
his sins, that after so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the
family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have
borne as its topmost bough an idler like myself. No aim that I
have ever cherished would they recognize as laudable; no success
of mine if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been
brightened by success. would they deem otherwise than worth-
less, if not positively disgraceful.
What is he? " murmurs
one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of
story-books! What kind of a business in life, what mode of
glorifying God or being serviceable to mankind in his day and
generation, may that be?
Why, the degenerate fellow might as
well have been a fiddler! " Such are the compliments bandied.
between my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time!
And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their
nature have intertwined themselves with mine.
―――――
-
Planted deep in the town's earliest infancy and childhood by
these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since sub-
sisted here; always too in respectability: never, so far as I have
known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or
never, on the other hand, after the first two generations, perform-
ing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim
to public notice. Gradually they have sunk almost out of sight;
as old houses, here and there about the streets, get covered half-
way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From father
## p. 7064 (#462) ###########################################
7064
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-
headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-
deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary
place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale,
which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy also
in due time passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tem-
pestuous manhood, and returned from his world wanderings, to
grow old and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth. This
long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth
and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the
locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral
circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct.
The new inhabitant - who came himself from a foreign land, or
whose father or grandfather came-has little claim to be called
a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with
which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping,
clings to the spot where his successive generations have been
imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that
he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead
level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest
of social atmospheres; - all these, and whatever faults besides he
may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell sur-
vives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly
Paradise.
So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to
make Salem my home; so that the mold of features and cast of
character which had all along been familiar here,-ever, as one
representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assum-
ing as it were his sentry march along the main street,— might
still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old town.
Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connec-
tion, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be sev-
ered. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato,
if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations
in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birth-
places, and so far as their fortunes may be within my control,
shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
## p. 7065 (#463) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7065
THE MINISTER'S VIGIL
From The Scarlet Letter>
S
HORTLY afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again
stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He
felt his limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness
of the night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend
the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break, and find him
there. The neighborhood would begin to rouse itself. The
earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a
vaguely defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and half
crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from door
to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost -as he
needs must think it-of some defunct transgressor. A dusky
tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then,
the morning light still waxing stronger, old patriarchs would rise
up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames
without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of
decorous personages who had never heretofore been seen with a
single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view with
the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bell-
ingham would come grimly forth with his King James's ruff
fastened askew; and Mistress Hibbins with some twigs of the
forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good
Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed,
and liking ill to be disturbed thus early out of his dreams about
the glorified saints. Hither likewise would come the elders and
deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young virgins who
so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him in
their white bosoms; which now, by-the-by, in their hurry and
confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to
cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come
stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and
horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they
discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom
but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half frozen to death, over-
whelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had
stood!
Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the min-
ister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great
## p. 7066 (#464) ###########################################
7066
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
peal of laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light,
airy, childish laugh, in which with a thrill of the heart- but he
knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute — he
recognized the tones of little Pearl.
"Pearl! little Pearl! " cried he after a moment's pause; then,
suppressing his voice,-"Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there? "
"Yes, it is Hester Prynne! " she replied, in a tone of sur-
prise; and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the
sidewalk, along which she had been passing. "It is I, and my
little Pearl. "
"Whence come you, Hester? " asked the minister. What
sent you hither? "
((
"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester
Prynne; "at Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his
measure for a robe, and am now going homeward to my dwell-
ing. "
"Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl," said the Rev-
erend Mr. Dimmesdale. "Ye have both been here before, but I
was not with you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand
all three together! "
She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform
holding little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's
other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came
what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his
own, pouring like a torrent into his heart and hurrying through
all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating
their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed
an electric chain.
"Minister! " whispered little Pearl.
"What wouldst thou say, child? " asked Mr. Dimmesdale.
"Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noon-
tide? " inquired Pearl.
"Nay, not so, my little Pearl," answered the minister; for
with the new energy of the moment, all the dread of public
exposure that had so long been the anguish of his life, had
returned upon him, and he was already trembling at the conjunc-
tion in which—with a strange joy, nevertheless- he now found
himself. "Not so, my child. I shall indeed stand with thy
mother and thee one other day, but not to-morrow. "
Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the
minister held it fast.
## p. 7067 (#465) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7067
"A moment longer, my child! " said he.
"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand and
mother's hand, to-morrow noontide? "
"Not then, Pearl," said the minister, "but another time. "
"And what other time? " persisted the child.
"At the great Judgment Day," whispered the minister,- and
strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of
the truth impelled him to answer the child so. "Then and there,
before the judgment seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must
stand together. But the daylight of this world shall not see our
meeting! "
Pearl laughed again.
But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed
far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused
by one of those meteors which the night watcher may so often
observe burning out to waste in the vacant regions of the atmo-
sphere. So powerful was its radiance that it thoroughly illumi-
nated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth.
The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp.
It showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of
midday, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to
familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses,
with their jutting stories and quaint gable peaks; the doorsteps
and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them;
the garden plots, black with freshly turned earth; the wheel track,
little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green
on either side,- all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect
that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of
this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood
the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne,
with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little
Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those
two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splen-
dor; as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the
daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.
## p. 7068 (#466) ###########################################
7068
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE
From The Scarlet Letter >
"THO
HOU wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she
and the minister sat watching little Pearl. "Dost thou
not think her beautiful? And see with what natural skill
she has made those simple flowers adorn her! Had she gathered
pearls and diamonds and rubies in the wood, they could not have
become her better. She is a splendid child! But I know whose
brow she has! "
"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale with an
unquiet smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at
thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Methought-O Hes-
ter, what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it! — that
my own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strik-
ingly that the world might see them! But she is mostly thine! "
"No, no! not mostly! " answered the mother with a tender
smile. "A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to
trace whose child she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks,
with those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies
whom we left in our dear old England had decked her out to
meet us. "
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In
her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered
to the world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic
in which was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,
- all written in this symbol, all plainly manifest, had there been
a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame!
And Pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil
what it might, how could they doubt that their earthly lives
and future destinies were conjoined, when they beheld at once
the material union and the spiritual idea in whom they met and
were to dwell immortally together? Thoughts like these - and
perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define
- threw an awe about the child as she came onward.
"Let her see nothing strange-no passion nor eagerness-in
thy way of accosting her," whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a
fitful and fantastic little elf sometimes. Especially she is seldom
tolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the
## p. 7069 (#467) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7069
why and wherefore. But the child hath strong affections. She
loves me, and will love thee! "
"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at
Hester Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns
for it! But in truth, as I already told thee, children are not
readily won to be familiar with me. They will not climb my
knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile; but stand
apart and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take
them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little
lifetime, hath been kind to me. The first time,-thou knowest
it well! The last was when thou led'st her with thee to the house
of yonder stern old governor. "
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine! "
answered the mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl.
Fear nothing! She may be strange and shy at first, but will
soon learn to love thee. "
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and
stood on the farther side, gazing silently at Hester and the
clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree trunk waiting
to receive her. Just where she had paused the brook chanced to
form a pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image
of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her
beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but
more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image, so
nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate
somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child
herself.
range, the way in which Pearl stood looking
so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest
gloom; herself meanwhile all glorified with a ray of sunshine.
that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the
brook beneath stood another child,- another and the same,-
with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself in some
indistinct and tantalizing manner estranged from Pearl; as if the
child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out
of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and
was now vainly seeking to return to it.
There was both truth and error in the impression: the child
and mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not
Pearl's. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate
had been admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and
so modified the aspect of them all that Pearl, the returning
## p. 7070 (#468) ###########################################
7070
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew
where she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister,
"that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that
thou canst never meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish
spirit, who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbid-
den to cross a running stream? Pray hasten her; for this delay
has already imparted a tremor to my nerves. "
"Come, dearest child! " said Hester encouragingly, and stretch-
ing out both her arms. How slow thou art! When hast thou
been so sluggish before now? Here is a friend of mine, who
must be thy friend also. Thou wilt have twice as much love,
henceforward, as thy mother alone could give thee! Leap across
the brook, and come to us. Thou canst leap like a young deer! "
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she
fixed her bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister,
and now included them both in the same glance, as if to detect
and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one
another. For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale
felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand-with that gesture
so habitual as to have become involuntary-stole over his heart.
At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched
out her hand, with the small forefinger extended and pointing
evidently towards her mother's breast. And beneath, in the mir-
ror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny image.
of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.
"Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to me? " ex-
claimed Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger; and a frown gathered
on her brow, the more impressive from the childish, the almost
baby-like, aspect of the features that conveyed it. As her mother
still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday
suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a
yet more imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again, was
the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its
pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the
aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee! " cried Hester
Prynne, who, however inured to such behavior on the elf-child's
part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly
## p. 7071 (#469) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7071
deportment now. "Leap across the brook, naughty child, and
run hither; else I must come to thee! "
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats any
more than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a
fit of passion, gesticulating violently and throwing her small
figure into the most extravagant contortions. She accompanied
this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods reverber-
ated on all sides; so that, alone as she was in her childish and
unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were
lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the
brook once more was the shadowy wraith of Pearl's image,
crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly
gesticulating, and in the midst of all, still pointing its small fore-
finger at Hester's bosom!
"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergy-
man, and turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her
trouble and annoyance. "Children will not abide any, the slight-
est, change in the accustomed aspect of things that are daily
before their eyes. Pearl misses something which she has always
seen me wear! "
"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means
of pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the can-
kered wrath of an old witch like Mistress Hibbins," added he,
attempting to smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner
encounter than this passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty,
as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify
her, if thou lovest me! "
Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon
her cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergyman, and then
a heavy sigh; while even before she had time to speak the blush
yielded to a deadly pallor.
"Pearl," said she sadly, "look down at thy feet! There! —
before thee! -on the hither side of the brook! "
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated; and there
lay the scarlet letter, so close upon the margin of the stream.
that the gold embroidery was reflected in it.
"Bring it hither! " said Hester.
"Come thou and take it up! " answered Pearl.
"Was ever such a child! " observed Hester, aside to the min-
ister. "Oh, I have much to tell thee about her! But in very
truth, she is right as regards this hateful token. I must bear its
## p. 7072 (#470) ###########################################
7072
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
torture yet a little longer,-only a few days longer,— until we
shall have left this region and look back hither as to a land
which we have dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it! The
mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up for-
ever! "
With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook,
took up the scarlet letter and fastened it again into her bosom.
Hopefully but a moment ago as Hester had spoken of drowning
it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon
her as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand
of fate. She had flung it into infinite space! she had drawn an
hour's free breath! - and here again was the scarlet misery, glit-
tering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus typified or
no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom.
And with this, and with the tears streaming down his cheeks,
poor Archie toddled forward with the uncertain step and out-
stretched arms of a little child. But Kate had already gained
the door, and was running screaming across the next room, and
so down the long corridor.
Poor Archie toddled after, his baby heart filled with mourn-
ing for the brindled cat that had been buried in the back garden
seven years before. - Seven years? or was it only yesterday?
## p. 7052 (#447) ###########################################
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## p. 7053 (#451) ###########################################
7053
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
(1804-1864)
BY HENRY JAMES
T IS perhaps an advantage in writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne's
work, that his life offers little opportunity to the biographer.
The record of it makes so few exactions that in a critical
account of him- even as brief as this-the work may easily take
most of the place. He was one of those happy men of letters in
whose course the great milestones are simply those of his ideas that
found successful form. Born at Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4th,
1804, of established local Puritan -and in a conspicuous degree,
sturdy seafaring-stock, he was educated at his birthplace and at
Bowdoin College, Maine, where H. W. Longfellow was one of his
fellow-students. Another was Franklin Pierce, who was to be elected
President of the United States in 1852, and with whom Hawthorne
formed relations that became an influence in his life. On leaving
college in 1825 he returned to Salem to live, and in 1828 published
in Boston a short romance called 'Fanshawe,' of which the scene, in
spite of its being a "love story," is laid, but for a change of name,
at Bowdoin, with professors and undergraduates for its male charac-
ters. The experiment was inevitably faint, but the author's beautiful
touch had begun to feel its way. In 1837, after a dozen years spent
in special solitude, as he later testified, at Salem, he collected as the
first series of 'Twice-Told Tales' various more or less unremunerated
contributions to the magazines and annuals of the day. In 1845 ap-
peared the second series, and in 1851 the two volumes were, with a
preface peculiarly graceful and touching, reissued together; he is in
general never more graceful than when prefatory. In 1851 and 1854
respectively came to light The Snow Image' and 'Mosses from an
Old Manse,' which form, with the previous double sheaf, his three
main gatherings-in of the shorter fiction. I neglect, for brevity and
as addressed to children, Grandfather's Chair' and 'The Wonder
Book' (1851), as well as Tanglewood Tales' (1852). Of the other
groups, some preceded, some followed, the appearance in 1850 of his
second novel, The Scarlet Letter. '
These things—the experiments in the shorter fiction — had sounded,
with their rare felicity, from the very first the note that was to be
Hawthorne's distinguished mark,- that feeling for the latent romance
## p. 7054 (#452) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7054
of New England, which in summary form is the most final name to
be given, I think, to his inspiration. This element, which is what at
its best his genius most expresses, was far from obvious, it had to
be looked for; and Hawthorne found it, as he wandered and mused,
in the secret play of the Puritan faith: the secret, I say particularly,
because the direct and ostensible, face to face with common tasks
and small conditions (as I may call them without prejudice to their
general grimness), arrived at forms of which the tender imagination
could make little. It could make a great deal, on the other hand, of
the spiritual contortions, the darkened outlook, of the ingrained sense
of sin, of evil, and of responsibility. There had been other complica-
tions in the history of the community surrounding him,- savages
from behind, soldiers from before, a cruel climate from every quarter
and a pecuniary remittance from none. But the great complication
was the pressing moral anxiety, the restless individual conscience.
These things were developed at the cost of so many others, that
there were almost no others left to help them to make a picture for
the artist. The artist's imagination had to deck out the subject, to
work it up, as we nowadays say; and Hawthorne's was,- —on intensely
chastened lines, indeed,-equal to the task. In that manner it came
into exercise from the first, through the necessity of taking for
granted, on the part of the society about him, a life of the spirit
more complex than anything that met the mere eye of sense. It was
a question of looking behind and beneath for the suggestive idea, the
artistic motive; the effect of all of which was an invaluable training
for the faculty that evokes and enhances. This ingenuity grew alert
and irrepressible as it manoeuvred for the back view and turned up
the under side of common aspects, - the laws secretly broken, the
impulses secretly felt, the hidden passions, the double lives, the dark
corners, the closed rooms, the skeletons in the cupboard and at the
feast. It made, in short, and cherished, for fancy's sake, a mystery
and a glamour where there were otherwise none very ready to its
hand; so that it ended by living in a world of things symbolic and
allegoric, a presentation of objects casting, in every case, far behind
them a shadow more curious and more amusing than the apparent
figure. Any figure therefore easily became with him an emblem,
any story a parable, any appearance a cover: things with which his
concern is gently, indulgently, skillfully, with the lightest hand in
the world-to pivot them round and show the odd little stamp or
sign that gives them their value for the collector.
The specimens he collected, as we may call them, are divisible
into groups, but with the mark in common that they are all early
products of the dry New England air. Some are myths and mys-
teries of old Massachusetts,- charming ghostly passages of colonial
-
## p. 7055 (#453) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7055
history. Such are 'The Grey Champion,' 'The Maypole of Merry
Mount,' the four beautiful Legends of the Province House. ' Others,
like 'Roger Malvin's Burial,' 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' 'Young Good-
man Brown,' are "moralities" without the moral, as it were; small
cold apologues, frosty and exquisite, occasionally gathered from be-
yond the sea. Then there are the chapters of the fanciful all for
fancy's sake, of the pure whimsical, and of observation merely
amused and beguiled; pages, many of them, of friendly humorous
reflections on what, in Salem or in Boston, a dreamer might meet in
his walks. What Hawthorne encountered he instinctively embroi-
dered, working it over with a fine, slow needle, and with flowers
pale, rosy, or dusky, as the case might suggest. We have a handful
of these in The Great Carbuncle' and 'The Great Stone Face,'
'The Seven Vagabonds,' 'The Threefold Destiny,' 'The Village
Uncle,' 'The Toll Gatherer's Day,' 'A Rill from the Town Pump,'
and 'Chippings with a Chisel. ' The inequalities in his work are not,
to my sense, great; and in specifying, we take and leave with hesi-
tation.
'The Scarlet Letter,' in 1850, brought him immediate distinction,
and has probably kept its place not only as the most original of his
novels, but as the most distinguished piece of prose fiction that was
to spring from American soil. He had received in 1839 an appoint-
ment to a small place in the Boston custom-house, where his labors
were sordid and sterile, and he had given it up in permissible weari-
ness. He had spent in 1841 near Roxbury, Massachusetts, a few
months in the co-operative community of Brook Farm, a short-lived
socialistic experiment. He had married in the following year and
gone to live at the old Manse at Concord, where he remained till
1846, when, with a fresh fiscal engagement, he returned to his native
town. It was in the intervals of his occupation at the Salem custom-
house that The Scarlet Letter' was written. The book has achieved
the fortune of the small supreme group of novels: it has hung an
ineffaceable image in the portrait gallery, the reserved inner cabinet,
of literature. Hester Prynne is not one of those characters of fiction
whom we use as a term of comparison for a character of fact: she is
almost more than that,- she decorates the museum in a way that
seems to forbid us such a freedom. Hawthorne availed himself, for
her history, of the most striking anecdote the early Puritan chronicle
could give him,—give him in the manner set forth by the long, lazy
Prologue or Introduction, an exquisite commemoration of the happy
dullness of his term of service at the custom-house, where it is his
fancy to pretend to have discovered in a box of old papers the faded
relic and the musty documents which suggested to him his title and
his theme.
## p. 7056 (#454) ###########################################
7056
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
It is the story as old as the custom of marriage, - the story of
the husband, the wife, and the lover; but bathed in a misty, moon-
shiny light, and completely neglecting the usual sources of emotion.
The wife, with the charming child of her guilt, has stood under the
stern inquisitorial law in the public pillory of the adulteress; while
the lover, a saintly young minister, undetected and unbetrayed, has
in an anguish of pusillanimity suffered her to pay the whole fine.
The husband, an ancient scholar, a man of abstruse and profane
learning, finds his revenge years after the wrong, in making himself
insidiously the intimate of the young minister, and feeding secretly on
the remorse, the inward torments, which he does everything to
quicken but pretends to have no ground for suspecting. The march
of the drama lies almost wholly in the malignant pressure exercised
in this manner by Chillingworth upon Dimmesdale; an influence that
at last reaches its climax in the extraordinary penance of the sub-
ject, who in the darkness, in the sleeping town, mounts, himself,
upon the scaffold on which, years before, the partner of his guilt has
undergone irrevocable anguish. In this situation he calls to him
Hester Prynne and her child, who, belated in the course of the merci-
ful ministrations to which Hester has now given herself up, pass,
among the shadows, within sight of him; and they in response to his
appeal ascend for a second time to the place of atonement, and
stand there with him under cover of night. The scene is not com-
plete, of course, till Chillingworth arrives to enjoy the spectacle and
his triumph. It has inevitably gained great praise, and no page of
Hawthorne's shows more intensity of imagination; yet the main
achievement of the book is not what is principally its subject,— the
picture of the relation of the two men. They are too faintly — the
husband in particular - though so fancifully figured. The Scarlet
Letter' lives, in spite of too many cold concetti,- Hawthorne's general
danger,- by something noble and truthful in the image of the
branded mother and the beautiful child. Strangely enough, this pair
are almost wholly outside the action; yet they preserve and vivify
the work. '
'The House of the Seven Gables,' written during a residence of
two years at Lenox, Massachusetts, was published in 1851. If there
are probably no four books of any author among which, for a favor-
ite, readers hesitate longer than between Hawthorne's four longest
stories, there are at any rate many for whom this remains distinctly
his largest and fullest production. Suffused as it is with a pleasant
autumnal haze, it yet brushes more closely than its companions the
surface of American life, comes a trifle nearer to being a novel of
manners. The manners it shows us indeed are all interfused with
the author's special tone, seen in a slanting afternoon light; but
## p. 7057 (#455) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7057
detail and illustration are sufficiently copious; and I am tempted for
my own part to pronounce the book, taking subject and treatment
together, and in spite of the position as a more concentrated classic
enjoyed by The Scarlet Letter,' the closest approach we are likely
to have to the great work of fiction, so often called for, that is to
do us nationally most honor and most good. The subject reduced
to its essence, indeed, accounts not quite altogether for all that there
is in the picture. What there is besides is an extraordinary charm of
expression, of sensibility, of humor, of touch. The question is that
of the mortal shrinkage of a family once uplifted, the last spasm of
their starved gentility and flicker of their slow extinction. In the
haunted world of Hawthorne's imagination the old Pyncheon house,
under its elm in the Salem by-street, is the place where the ghosts
are most at home. Ghostly even are its actual tenants, the ancient
virgin Hepzibah, with her turban, her scowl, her creaking joints, and
her map of the great territory to the eastward belonging to her
family, reduced, in these dignities, to selling profitless pennyworths
over a counter; and the bewildered bachelor Clifford, released, like
some blinking and noble déterré of the old Bastile, from twenty
years of wrongful imprisonment. We meet at every turn, with Haw-
thorne, his favorite fancy of communicated sorrows and inevitable
atonements. Life is an experience in which we expiate the sins of
others in the intervals of expiating our own. The heaviest visitation
of the blighted Pyncheons is the responsibility they have incurred
through the misdeeds of a hard-hearted witch-burning ancestor. This
ancestor has an effective return to life in the person of the one actu-
ally robust and successful representative of the race, - a bland, hard,
showy, shallow "ornament of the bench," a massive hypocrite and
sensualist, who at last, though indeed too late, pays the penalty and
removes the curse. The idea of the story is at once perhaps a trifle
thin and a trifle obvious,—the idea that races and individuals may
die of mere dignity and heredity, and that they need for refreshment
and cleansing to be, from without, breathed upon like dull mirrors.
But the art of the thing is exquisite, its charm irresistible, its dis-
tinction complete. The House of the Seven Gables,' I may add, con-
tains in the rich portrait of Judge Pyncheon a character more solidly
suggested than—with the possible exception of the Zenobia of 'The
Blithedale Romance - any other figure in the author's list.
―
Weary of Lenox, Hawthorne spent several months of 1852 at West
Newton near Boston, where The Blithedale Romance' was brought
forth. He made the most, for the food of fancy, of what came
under his hand, happy in an appetite that could often find a feast
in meagre materials. The third of his novels is an echo, delightfully
poetized, of his residence at Brook Farm. "Transcendentalism" was
XII-442
## p. 7058 (#456) ###########################################
7058
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
in those days in New England much in the air; and the most com-
prehensive account of the partakers of this quaint experiment appears
to have been held to be that they were Transcendentalists. More sim-
ply stated, they were young, candid radicals, reformers, philanthro-
pists. The fact that it sprang-all irresponsibly indeed-from the
observation of a known episode, gives 'The Blithedale Romance' also
a certain value as a picture of manners; the place portrayed, how-
ever, opens quickly enough into the pleasantest and idlest dream-
world. Hawthorne, we gather, dreamed there more than he worked;
he has traced his attitude delightfully in that of the fitful and iron-
ical Coverdale, as to whom we wonder why he chose to rub shoul-
ders quite so much. We think of him as drowsing on a hillside with
his hat pulled over his eyes, and the neighboring hum of reform
turning in his ears, to a refrain as vague as an old song. One
thing is certain: that if he failed his companions as a laborer in the
field, it was only that he might associate them with another sort of
success.
We feel, however, that he lets them off easily, when we think of
some of the queer figures and queer nostrums then abroad in the
land, and which his mild satire - incurring none the less some mild
reproach fails to grind in its mill. The idea that he most tangibly
presents is that of the unconscious way in which the search for the
common good may cover a hundred interested impulses and personal
motives; the suggestion that such a company could only be bound
together more by its delusions, its mutual suspicions and frictions,
than by any successful surrender of self. The book contains two
images of large and admirable intention: that of Hollingsworth the
heavy-handed radical, selfish and sincere, with no sense for jokes,
for forms, or for shades; and that of Zenobia the woman of "sym-
pathies," the passionate patroness of "causes," who plays as it were
with revolution, and only encounters embarrassment. Zenobia is the
most graceful of all portraits of the strong-minded of her sex; bor-
rowing something of her grace, moreover, from the fate that was not
to allow her to grow old and shrill, and not least touching from the
air we attribute to her of looking, with her fine imagination, for ad-
ventures that were hardly, under the circumstances, to be met. We
fill out the figure, perhaps, and even lend to the vision something
more than Hawthorne intended. Zenobia was, like Coverdale him-
self, a subject of dreams that were not to find form at Roxbury; but
Coverdale had other resources, while she had none but her final fail-
ure. Hawthorne indicates no more interesting aspect of the matter
than her baffled effort to make a hero of Hollingsworth, who proves,
to her misfortune, so much too inelastic for the part. All this, as
we read it to-day, has a soft, shy glamour, a touch of the poetry of
## p. 7059 (#457) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7059
far-off things. Nothing of the author's is a happier expression of
what I have called his sense of the romance of New England.
In 1853 Franklin Pierce, then President, appointed him consul at
Liverpool, which was the beginning of a residence of some seven
years in England and in Italy, the period to which we owe The
Marble Faun' and 'Our Old Home. ' The material for the latter of
these was the first to be gathered; but the appearance of The Mar-
ble Faun,' begun in Rome in 1858 and finished during a second stay
in England, preceded that of its companion. This is his only long
drama on a foreign stage. Drawn from his own air, however, are
much of its inspiration and its character. Hawthorne took with him
to Italy, as he had done to England, more of the old Puritan con-
sciousness than he left behind. The book has been consecrated as a
kind of manual of Roman sights and impressions, brought together
indeed in the light of a sympathy always detached and often with-
held; and its value is not diminished by its constant reference to an
order of things of which, at present, the yearning pilgrim - before a
board for the most part swept bare- -can only pick up the crumbs.
The mystical, the mythical, are in The Marble Faun' more than
ever at hide-and-seek with the real. The author's fancy for freakish
correspondences has its way, with Donatello's points of resemblance
to the delightful statue in the Capitol. What he offers us is the
history of a character blissfully immature, awakening to manhood
through the accidental, the almost unconscious, commission of a crime.
For the happy youth before his act-the first complete act of his
life- there have been no unanswered questions; but after it he finds
himself confronted with all the weary questions of the world. This
act consists of his ridding of an obscure tormentor-the obscurity is
rather a mistake-a woman whom he loves, and who is older,
cleverer, and more acquainted with life than himself. The humaniz-
ing, the moralizing of the faun is again an ingenious conceit; but it
has had for result to have made the subject of the process - and the
case is unique in Hawthorne's work-one of those creations of the
story-teller who give us a name for a type. There is a kind of young
man whom we have now only to call a Donatello, to feel that we suf-
ficiently classify him. It is a part of the scheme of the story to
extend to still another nature than his the same sad initiation. A
young woman from across the Atlantic, a gentle copyist in Roman
galleries of still gentler Guidos and Guercinos, happens to have caught
a glimpse, at the critical moment, of the dismal secret that unites
Donatello and Miriam. This, for her, is the tree of bitter knowledge,
the taste of which sickens and saddens her. The burden is more
than she can bear, and one of the most charming passages in the
book describes how at last, at a summer's end, in sultry solitude, she
## p. 7060 (#458) ###########################################
7060
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
stops at St. Peter's before a confessional, and Protestant and Puritan
as she is, yields to the necessity of kneeling there and ridding herself
of her obsession. Hawthorne's young women are exquisite; Hilda is
a happy sister to the Phoebe of 'The House of the Seven Gables'
and the Priscilla of The Blithedale Romance. '
The drama in The Marble Faun' none the less, I think, is of an
effect less complete than that of the almost larger element that I
can only call the landscape and the spirit. Nothing is more striking
than the awkward grace with which the author utters, without con-
senting to it, for he is full of half-amiable, half-angry protest and
prejudice, the message, the mystery of the medium in which his
actors move. Miriam and her muffled bandit have faded away, and
we have our doubts and even our fears about Kenyon and his Ameri-
can statuary; but the breath of old Rome, the sense of old Italy, still
meet us as we turn the page, and the book will long, on the great
sentimental journey, continue to peep out of most pockets.
He returned to America in 1860, settled once more at Concord,
and died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the arms of Franklin
Pierce, in 1864. At home, with the aid of many memories and of
the copious diaries ultimately published by his wife and children, he
brought forth, one by one, the chapters eventually collected under
the title of Our Old Home. ' The American 'Note Books,' the Eng-
lish, and the French and Italian, were given to the world after his
death,— in 1868, 1870, and 1871 respectively; and if I add to these the
small "campaign" (Life of Franklin Pierce' (1852), two posthumous
fragments, 'Septimius Felton' and 'The Dolliver Romance,' and those
scraps and shreds of which his table drawers were still more exhaust-
ively emptied, his literary catalogue - none of the longest - becomes
complete.
The important item in this remainder is the close, ripe cluster,
the series presented by himself, of his impressions of England. These
admirable papers, with much of the same fascination, have something
of the same uncomforted note with which he had surrendered him-
self to the charm of Italy: the mixture of sensibility and reluctance,
of response and dissent, the strife between his sense of beauty and
his sense of banishment. He came to the Old World late in life-
though after dabbling for years, indeed, in the fancied phenomena of
time, and with inevitable reserves, mistrusts, and antagonisms. The
striking thing to my sense, however, is not what he missed but what
he so ingeniously and vividly made out. If he had been, imagina-
tively, rather old in his youth, he was youthful in his age; and when
all is said, we owe him, as a contribution to the immemorial pro-
cess of lively repartee between the mother land and the daughter,
the only pages of the business that can be said to belong to pure
## p. 7061 (#459) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7061
literature. He was capable of writing 'The Marble Faun,' and yet of
declaring, in a letter from Rome, that he bitterly detested the place
and should rejoice to bid it farewell for ever. Just so he was capa-
ble of drawing from English aspects a delight that they had yielded
not even to Washington Irving, and yet of insisting, with a perver-
sity that both smiled and frowned, that they rubbed him mainly all
the wrong way. At home he had fingered the musty, but abroad
he seemed to pine for freshness. In truth, for many persons his
great, his most touching sign will have been his aloofness wherever
he is. He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is
an æsthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing
that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window.
It was
a faculty that gave him much more a terrible sense of human abysses
than a desire rashly to sound them and rise to the surface with
his report. On the surface- the surface of the soul and the edge of
the tragedy he preferred to remain. He lingered, to weave his
web, in the thin exterior air. This is a partial expression of his
characteristic habit of dipping, of diving just for sport, into the
moral world without being in the least a moralist. He had none of
the heat nor of the dogmatism of that character; none of the imper-
tinence, as we feel he would almost have held it, of any intermed-
dling. He never intermeddled; he was divertedly and discreetly
contemplative, pausing oftenest wherever, amid prosaic aspects, there
seemed most of an appeal to a sense for subtleties. But of all cynics
he was the brightest and kindest, and the subtleties he spun are
mere silken threads for stringing polished beads. His collection of
moral mysteries is the cabinet of a dilettante.
Huy Jammer
[All the following selections from Hawthorne's works are made from the
authorized editions, published by Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , Boston, and
are reprinted by their permission. ]
SALEM AND THE HAWTHORNES
From The Scarlet Letter>
TH
HIS old town of Salem-my native place, though I have dwelt
much away from it, both in boyhood and maturer years-
possesses or did possess a hold on my affections, the force
of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual
## p. 7062 (#460) ###########################################
7062
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
residence here. Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is con-
cerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden
houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty; its
irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only
tame; its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through
the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New
Guinea at one end and a view of the almshouse at the other,-
such being the features of my native town, it would be quite
as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged
checker-board. And yet, though invariably happiest elsewhere,
there is within me a feeling for old Salem, which in lack of a
better phrase I must be content to call affection. The sentiment
is probably assignable to the deep and aged roots which my fam-
ily has struck into the soil. It is now nearly two centuries and
a quarter since the original Briton, the earliest emigrant of my
name, made his appearance in the wild and forest-bordered settle-
ment which has since become a city. And here his descendants
have been born and died, and have mingled their earthly sub-
stance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily
be akin to the mortal frame wherewith for a little while I walk
the streets. In part, therefore, the attachment which I speak of
is the mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust.
Few of my
countrymen can know what it is; nor, as frequent transplantation
is perhaps better for the stock, need they consider it desirable to
know.
But the sentiment has likewise its moral quality. The figure
of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and
dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far
back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort
of home feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in refer-
ence to the present phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger
claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded,
sable-cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor,-who came so early,
with his Bible and his sword, and trode the unworn street with
such a stately port, and made so large a figure as a man of war
and peace, a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is
seldom heard and my face hardly known.
He was a soldier,
legislator, judge; he was a ruler in the Church; he had all the
Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was likewise a bitter
persecutor; as witness the Quakers, who have remembered him.
in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard severity
towards a woman of their sect which will last longer, it is to be
――――――
## p. 7063 (#461) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7063
feared, than any record of his better deeds, although these were
many. His son too inherited the persecuting spirit, and made
himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches that their
blood may fairly be said to have left a stain upon him. So deep
a stain indeed that his old dry bones, in the Charter Street burial-
ground, must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to
dust! I know not whether these ancestors of mine bethought
themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruel-
ties, or whether they are now groaning under the heavy conse-
quences of them, in another state of being. At all events, I the
present writer, as their representative, hereby take shame upon
myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them
-as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition
of the race for many a long year back would argue to exist -
may be now and henceforth removed.
Doubtless, however, either of these stern and black-browed
Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for
his sins, that after so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the
family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have
borne as its topmost bough an idler like myself. No aim that I
have ever cherished would they recognize as laudable; no success
of mine if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been
brightened by success. would they deem otherwise than worth-
less, if not positively disgraceful.
What is he? " murmurs
one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of
story-books! What kind of a business in life, what mode of
glorifying God or being serviceable to mankind in his day and
generation, may that be?
Why, the degenerate fellow might as
well have been a fiddler! " Such are the compliments bandied.
between my great-grandsires and myself, across the gulf of time!
And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their
nature have intertwined themselves with mine.
―――――
-
Planted deep in the town's earliest infancy and childhood by
these two earnest and energetic men, the race has ever since sub-
sisted here; always too in respectability: never, so far as I have
known, disgraced by a single unworthy member; but seldom or
never, on the other hand, after the first two generations, perform-
ing any memorable deed, or so much as putting forward a claim
to public notice. Gradually they have sunk almost out of sight;
as old houses, here and there about the streets, get covered half-
way to the eaves by the accumulation of new soil. From father
## p. 7064 (#462) ###########################################
7064
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a gray-
headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-
deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary
place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale,
which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy also
in due time passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tem-
pestuous manhood, and returned from his world wanderings, to
grow old and die, and mingle his dust with the natal earth. This
long connection of a family with one spot, as its place of birth
and burial, creates a kindred between the human being and the
locality, quite independent of any charm in the scenery or moral
circumstances that surround him. It is not love, but instinct.
The new inhabitant - who came himself from a foreign land, or
whose father or grandfather came-has little claim to be called
a Salemite; he has no conception of the oyster-like tenacity with
which an old settler, over whom his third century is creeping,
clings to the spot where his successive generations have been
imbedded. It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that
he is weary of the old wooden houses, the mud and dust, the dead
level of site and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chillest
of social atmospheres; - all these, and whatever faults besides he
may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell sur-
vives, and just as powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly
Paradise.
So has it been in my case. I felt it almost as a destiny to
make Salem my home; so that the mold of features and cast of
character which had all along been familiar here,-ever, as one
representative of the race lay down in his grave, another assum-
ing as it were his sentry march along the main street,— might
still in my little day be seen and recognized in the old town.
Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence that the connec-
tion, which has become an unhealthy one, should at last be sev-
ered. Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato,
if it be planted and replanted for too long a series of generations
in the same worn-out soil. My children have had other birth-
places, and so far as their fortunes may be within my control,
shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
## p. 7065 (#463) ###########################################
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7065
THE MINISTER'S VIGIL
From The Scarlet Letter>
S
HORTLY afterwards, the like grisly sense of the humorous again
stole in among the solemn phantoms of his thought. He
felt his limbs growing stiff with the unaccustomed chilliness
of the night, and doubted whether he should be able to descend
the steps of the scaffold. Morning would break, and find him
there. The neighborhood would begin to rouse itself. The
earliest riser, coming forth in the dim twilight, would perceive a
vaguely defined figure aloft on the place of shame; and half
crazed betwixt alarm and curiosity, would go knocking from door
to door, summoning all the people to behold the ghost -as he
needs must think it-of some defunct transgressor. A dusky
tumult would flap its wings from one house to another. Then,
the morning light still waxing stronger, old patriarchs would rise
up in great haste, each in his flannel gown, and matronly dames
without pausing to put off their night-gear. The whole tribe of
decorous personages who had never heretofore been seen with a
single hair of their heads awry, would start into public view with
the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects. Old Governor Bell-
ingham would come grimly forth with his King James's ruff
fastened askew; and Mistress Hibbins with some twigs of the
forest clinging to her skirts, and looking sourer than ever, as
having hardly got a wink of sleep after her night ride; and good
Father Wilson too, after spending half the night at a death-bed,
and liking ill to be disturbed thus early out of his dreams about
the glorified saints. Hither likewise would come the elders and
deacons of Mr. Dimmesdale's church, and the young virgins who
so idolized their minister, and had made a shrine for him in
their white bosoms; which now, by-the-by, in their hurry and
confusion, they would scantly have given themselves time to
cover with their kerchiefs. All people, in a word, would come
stumbling over their thresholds, and turning up their amazed and
horror-stricken visages around the scaffold. Whom would they
discern there, with the red eastern light upon his brow? Whom
but the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, half frozen to death, over-
whelmed with shame, and standing where Hester Prynne had
stood!
Carried away by the grotesque horror of this picture, the min-
ister, unawares, and to his own infinite alarm, burst into a great
## p. 7066 (#464) ###########################################
7066
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
peal of laughter. It was immediately responded to by a light,
airy, childish laugh, in which with a thrill of the heart- but he
knew not whether of exquisite pain, or pleasure as acute — he
recognized the tones of little Pearl.
"Pearl! little Pearl! " cried he after a moment's pause; then,
suppressing his voice,-"Hester! Hester Prynne! Are you there? "
"Yes, it is Hester Prynne! " she replied, in a tone of sur-
prise; and the minister heard her footsteps approaching from the
sidewalk, along which she had been passing. "It is I, and my
little Pearl. "
"Whence come you, Hester? " asked the minister. What
sent you hither? "
((
"I have been watching at a death-bed," answered Hester
Prynne; "at Governor Winthrop's death-bed, and have taken his
measure for a robe, and am now going homeward to my dwell-
ing. "
"Come up hither, Hester, thou and little Pearl," said the Rev-
erend Mr. Dimmesdale. "Ye have both been here before, but I
was not with you. Come up hither once again, and we will stand
all three together! "
She silently ascended the steps, and stood on the platform
holding little Pearl by the hand. The minister felt for the child's
other hand, and took it. The moment that he did so, there came
what seemed a tumultuous rush of new life, other life than his
own, pouring like a torrent into his heart and hurrying through
all his veins, as if the mother and the child were communicating
their vital warmth to his half-torpid system. The three formed
an electric chain.
"Minister! " whispered little Pearl.
"What wouldst thou say, child? " asked Mr. Dimmesdale.
"Wilt thou stand here with mother and me, to-morrow noon-
tide? " inquired Pearl.
"Nay, not so, my little Pearl," answered the minister; for
with the new energy of the moment, all the dread of public
exposure that had so long been the anguish of his life, had
returned upon him, and he was already trembling at the conjunc-
tion in which—with a strange joy, nevertheless- he now found
himself. "Not so, my child. I shall indeed stand with thy
mother and thee one other day, but not to-morrow. "
Pearl laughed, and attempted to pull away her hand. But the
minister held it fast.
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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7067
"A moment longer, my child! " said he.
"But wilt thou promise," asked Pearl, "to take my hand and
mother's hand, to-morrow noontide? "
"Not then, Pearl," said the minister, "but another time. "
"And what other time? " persisted the child.
"At the great Judgment Day," whispered the minister,- and
strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of
the truth impelled him to answer the child so. "Then and there,
before the judgment seat, thy mother, and thou, and I must
stand together. But the daylight of this world shall not see our
meeting! "
Pearl laughed again.
But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed
far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused
by one of those meteors which the night watcher may so often
observe burning out to waste in the vacant regions of the atmo-
sphere. So powerful was its radiance that it thoroughly illumi-
nated the dense medium of cloud betwixt the sky and earth.
The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp.
It showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of
midday, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to
familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden houses,
with their jutting stories and quaint gable peaks; the doorsteps
and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about them;
the garden plots, black with freshly turned earth; the wheel track,
little worn, and even in the market-place margined with green
on either side,- all were visible, but with a singularity of aspect
that seemed to give another moral interpretation to the things of
this world than they had ever borne before. And there stood
the minister, with his hand over his heart; and Hester Prynne,
with the embroidered letter glimmering on her bosom; and little
Pearl, herself a symbol, and the connecting link between those
two. They stood in the noon of that strange and solemn splen-
dor; as if it were the light that is to reveal all secrets, and the
daybreak that shall unite all who belong to one another.
## p. 7068 (#466) ###########################################
7068
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE
From The Scarlet Letter >
"THO
HOU wilt love her dearly," repeated Hester Prynne, as she
and the minister sat watching little Pearl. "Dost thou
not think her beautiful? And see with what natural skill
she has made those simple flowers adorn her! Had she gathered
pearls and diamonds and rubies in the wood, they could not have
become her better. She is a splendid child! But I know whose
brow she has! "
"Dost thou know, Hester," said Arthur Dimmesdale with an
unquiet smile, "that this dear child, tripping about always at
thy side, hath caused me many an alarm? Methought-O Hes-
ter, what a thought is that, and how terrible to dread it! — that
my own features were partly repeated in her face, and so strik-
ingly that the world might see them! But she is mostly thine! "
"No, no! not mostly! " answered the mother with a tender
smile. "A little longer, and thou needest not to be afraid to
trace whose child she is. But how strangely beautiful she looks,
with those wild flowers in her hair! It is as if one of the fairies
whom we left in our dear old England had decked her out to
meet us. "
It was with a feeling which neither of them had ever before
experienced that they sat and watched Pearl's slow advance. In
her was visible the tie that united them. She had been offered
to the world, these seven years past, as the living hieroglyphic
in which was revealed the secret they so darkly sought to hide,
- all written in this symbol, all plainly manifest, had there been
a prophet or magician skilled to read the character of flame!
And Pearl was the oneness of their being. Be the foregone evil
what it might, how could they doubt that their earthly lives
and future destinies were conjoined, when they beheld at once
the material union and the spiritual idea in whom they met and
were to dwell immortally together? Thoughts like these - and
perhaps other thoughts, which they did not acknowledge or define
- threw an awe about the child as she came onward.
"Let her see nothing strange-no passion nor eagerness-in
thy way of accosting her," whispered Hester. "Our Pearl is a
fitful and fantastic little elf sometimes. Especially she is seldom
tolerant of emotion, when she does not fully comprehend the
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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7069
why and wherefore. But the child hath strong affections. She
loves me, and will love thee! "
"Thou canst not think," said the minister, glancing aside at
Hester Prynne, "how my heart dreads this interview, and yearns
for it! But in truth, as I already told thee, children are not
readily won to be familiar with me. They will not climb my
knee, nor prattle in my ear, nor answer to my smile; but stand
apart and eye me strangely. Even little babes, when I take
them in my arms, weep bitterly. Yet Pearl, twice in her little
lifetime, hath been kind to me. The first time,-thou knowest
it well! The last was when thou led'st her with thee to the house
of yonder stern old governor. "
"And thou didst plead so bravely in her behalf and mine! "
answered the mother. "I remember it; and so shall little Pearl.
Fear nothing! She may be strange and shy at first, but will
soon learn to love thee. "
By this time Pearl had reached the margin of the brook, and
stood on the farther side, gazing silently at Hester and the
clergyman, who still sat together on the mossy tree trunk waiting
to receive her. Just where she had paused the brook chanced to
form a pool, so smooth and quiet that it reflected a perfect image
of her little figure, with all the brilliant picturesqueness of her
beauty, in its adornment of flowers and wreathed foliage, but
more refined and spiritualized than the reality. This image, so
nearly identical with the living Pearl, seemed to communicate
somewhat of its own shadowy and intangible quality to the child
herself.
range, the way in which Pearl stood looking
so steadfastly at them through the dim medium of the forest
gloom; herself meanwhile all glorified with a ray of sunshine.
that was attracted thitherward as by a certain sympathy. In the
brook beneath stood another child,- another and the same,-
with likewise its ray of golden light. Hester felt herself in some
indistinct and tantalizing manner estranged from Pearl; as if the
child, in her lonely ramble through the forest, had strayed out
of the sphere in which she and her mother dwelt together, and
was now vainly seeking to return to it.
There was both truth and error in the impression: the child
and mother were estranged, but through Hester's fault, not
Pearl's. Since the latter rambled from her side, another inmate
had been admitted within the circle of the mother's feelings, and
so modified the aspect of them all that Pearl, the returning
## p. 7070 (#468) ###########################################
7070
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
wanderer, could not find her wonted place, and hardly knew
where she was.
"I have a strange fancy," observed the sensitive minister,
"that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that
thou canst never meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish
spirit, who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbid-
den to cross a running stream? Pray hasten her; for this delay
has already imparted a tremor to my nerves. "
"Come, dearest child! " said Hester encouragingly, and stretch-
ing out both her arms. How slow thou art! When hast thou
been so sluggish before now? Here is a friend of mine, who
must be thy friend also. Thou wilt have twice as much love,
henceforward, as thy mother alone could give thee! Leap across
the brook, and come to us. Thou canst leap like a young deer! "
Pearl, without responding in any manner to these honey-sweet
expressions, remained on the other side of the brook. Now she
fixed her bright wild eyes on her mother, now on the minister,
and now included them both in the same glance, as if to detect
and explain to herself the relation which they bore to one
another. For some unaccountable reason, as Arthur Dimmesdale
felt the child's eyes upon himself, his hand-with that gesture
so habitual as to have become involuntary-stole over his heart.
At length, assuming a singular air of authority, Pearl stretched
out her hand, with the small forefinger extended and pointing
evidently towards her mother's breast. And beneath, in the mir-
ror of the brook, there was the flower-girdled and sunny image.
of little Pearl, pointing her small forefinger too.
"Thou strange child, why dost thou not come to me? " ex-
claimed Hester.
Pearl still pointed with her forefinger; and a frown gathered
on her brow, the more impressive from the childish, the almost
baby-like, aspect of the features that conveyed it. As her mother
still kept beckoning to her, and arraying her face in a holiday
suit of unaccustomed smiles, the child stamped her foot with a
yet more imperious look and gesture. In the brook, again, was
the fantastic beauty of the image, with its reflected frown, its
pointed finger, and imperious gesture, giving emphasis to the
aspect of little Pearl.
"Hasten, Pearl, or I shall be angry with thee! " cried Hester
Prynne, who, however inured to such behavior on the elf-child's
part at other seasons, was naturally anxious for a more seemly
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NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
7071
deportment now. "Leap across the brook, naughty child, and
run hither; else I must come to thee! "
But Pearl, not a whit startled at her mother's threats any
more than mollified by her entreaties, now suddenly burst into a
fit of passion, gesticulating violently and throwing her small
figure into the most extravagant contortions. She accompanied
this wild outbreak with piercing shrieks, which the woods reverber-
ated on all sides; so that, alone as she was in her childish and
unreasonable wrath, it seemed as if a hidden multitude were
lending her their sympathy and encouragement. Seen in the
brook once more was the shadowy wraith of Pearl's image,
crowned and girdled with flowers, but stamping its foot, wildly
gesticulating, and in the midst of all, still pointing its small fore-
finger at Hester's bosom!
"I see what ails the child," whispered Hester to the clergy-
man, and turning pale in spite of a strong effort to conceal her
trouble and annoyance. "Children will not abide any, the slight-
est, change in the accustomed aspect of things that are daily
before their eyes. Pearl misses something which she has always
seen me wear! "
"I pray you," answered the minister, "if thou hast any means
of pacifying the child, do it forthwith! Save it were the can-
kered wrath of an old witch like Mistress Hibbins," added he,
attempting to smile, "I know nothing that I would not sooner
encounter than this passion in a child. In Pearl's young beauty,
as in the wrinkled witch, it has a preternatural effect. Pacify
her, if thou lovest me! "
Hester turned again towards Pearl, with a crimson blush upon
her cheek, a conscious glance aside at the clergyman, and then
a heavy sigh; while even before she had time to speak the blush
yielded to a deadly pallor.
"Pearl," said she sadly, "look down at thy feet! There! —
before thee! -on the hither side of the brook! "
The child turned her eyes to the point indicated; and there
lay the scarlet letter, so close upon the margin of the stream.
that the gold embroidery was reflected in it.
"Bring it hither! " said Hester.
"Come thou and take it up! " answered Pearl.
"Was ever such a child! " observed Hester, aside to the min-
ister. "Oh, I have much to tell thee about her! But in very
truth, she is right as regards this hateful token. I must bear its
## p. 7072 (#470) ###########################################
7072
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE
torture yet a little longer,-only a few days longer,— until we
shall have left this region and look back hither as to a land
which we have dreamed of. The forest cannot hide it! The
mid-ocean shall take it from my hand, and swallow it up for-
ever! "
With these words she advanced to the margin of the brook,
took up the scarlet letter and fastened it again into her bosom.
Hopefully but a moment ago as Hester had spoken of drowning
it in the deep sea, there was a sense of inevitable doom upon
her as she thus received back this deadly symbol from the hand
of fate. She had flung it into infinite space! she had drawn an
hour's free breath! - and here again was the scarlet misery, glit-
tering on the old spot! So it ever is, whether thus typified or
no, that an evil deed invests itself with the character of doom.
