Be all this as it may, there can be no question as to the propriety of my inscribing this volume of earlier and later sketches to you, and pausing here, a few moments, to speak of them, as friend speaks to friend; still being cautious, however, that the public and the critics shall overhear nothing which we care about concealing. On you, if on no other person, I am entitled to rely, to sustain the position of my Dedicatee. If anybody is responsible for my being at this day an author, it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but, while we were lads together at a country college,—gathering blue-berries, in study-hours, under those tall academic pines; or watching the great logs, as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or shooting pigeons and gray squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the summer twilight; or catching trouts in that shadowy little stream which, I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest,—though you and I will never cast a line in it again,—two idle lads, in short (as we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things that the Faculty never heard of, or else it had been the worse for us,—still it was your prognostic of your friend’s destiny, that he was to be a writer of fiction.
And a fiction-monger, in due season, he became. But, was there ever such a weary delay in obtaining the slightest recognition from the public, as in my case? I sat down by the way-side of life, like a man under enchantment, and a shrubbery sprung up around me, and the bushes grew to be saplings, and the saplings became trees, until no exit appeared possible, through the entangling depths of my obscurity. And there, perhaps, I should be sitting at this moment, with the moss on the imprisoning tree-trunks, and the yellow leaves of more than a score of autumns piled above me, if it had not been for you. For it was through your interposition,—and that, moreover, unknown to himself,—that your early friend was brought before the public, somewhat more prominently than theretofore, in the first volume of Twice-told Tales. Not a publisher in America, I presume, would have thought well enough of my forgotten or never noticed stories, to risk the expense of print and paper; nor do I say this with any purpose of casting odium on the respectable fraternity of book-sellers, for their blindness to my wonderful merit. To confess the truth, I doubted of the public recognition quite as much as they could do. So much the more generous was your confidence; and knowing, as I do, that it was founded on old friendship rather than cold criticism, I value it only the more for that.
So, now, when I turn back upon my path, lighted by a transitory gleam of public favor, to pick up a few articles which were left out of my former collections, I take pleasure in making them the memorial of our very long and unbroken connection. Some of these sketches were among the earliest that I wrote, and, after lying for years in manuscript, they at last skulked into the Annuals or Magazines, and have hidden themselves there ever since. Others were the productions of a later period; others, again, were written recently. The comparison of these various trifles—the indices of intellectual condition at far separated epochs—affects me with a singular complexity of regrets. I am disposed to quarrel with the earlier sketches, both because a mature judgment discerns so many faults, and still more because they come so nearly up to the standard of the best that I can achieve now. The ripened autumnal fruit tastes but little better than the early windfalls. It would, indeed, be mortifying to believe that the summertime of life has passed away, without any greater progress and improvement than is indicated here. But,—at least, so I would fain hope,—these things are scarcely to be depended upon, as measures of the intellectual and moral man. In youth, men are apt to write more wisely than they really know or feel; and the remainder of life may be not idly spent in realizing and convincing themselves of the wisdom which they uttered long ago. The truth that was only in the fancy then may have since become a substance in the mind and heart.
I have nothing further, I think, to say; unless it be that the public need not dread my again trespassing on its kindness, with any more of these musty and mouse-nibbled leaves of old periodicals, transformed, by the magic arts of my friendly publishers, into a new book. These are the last. Or, if a few still remain, they are either such as no paternal partiality could induce the author to think worth preserving, or else they have got into some very dark and dusty hiding-place, quite out of my own remembrance and whence no researches can avail to unearth them. So there let them rest.
Very sincerely yours,
N. H.
LENOX, NOVEMBER IST, 1851.
II
THE SCARLET LETTER 1850
EDITOR’S NOTE
The short novel called The Scarlet Letter and known throughout the world in countless translations, editions, reprintings, and adaptations started out to be one more of Hawthorne’s tales. But then, with some encouragement from his publisher, James T. Fields, who read an early draft and evidently saw in it certain possibilities for expansion, the tale turned into something anomalous in the way of fiction: a story too long for a tale but too short, in that day of three-decker novels, to be bound and sold by itself.
After considering a number of possible solutions to this marketing problem, Fields decided to print the tale along with a sketch that Hawthorne had just written to avenge his dismissal from the Salem Custom House. Its lightly satiric tone, Hawthorne thought, might help to relieve the preponderant gloom of The Scarlet Letter, which he feared would weary some readers and disgust others. All the sketch needed was “an imaginative touch,” recounting his purported discovery, upstairs in the Salem Custom House, of Hester Prynne’s faded badge and a handwritten account of her trials.
From that day on, “The Custom House” has prefaced every appearance of The Scarlet Letter in print, challenging readers to explain to themselves and each other just how and why these two very dissimilar texts, journalistic sketch and emblematic tale, belong together. The fact is that, with some slight amendment of the sort given to “The Custom House,” almost anything Hawthorne had written since Fanshawe would have served about as well to introduce the story of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale. Indeed, a number of those earlier pieces might have served the purpose a good deal better, considerably easing the burden, assumed by critics and imposed upon generations of students by their instructors, of having to discover or invent connections between the novel and its preface. Accordingly, The Scarlet Letter appears in this collection without “The Custom House,” leaving the tales in the preceding section to “pave the reader’s way,” as he said a preface should, “into the interior edifice” of this remarkable novel.
There is evidence scattered throughout Hawthorne’s previous writings, both printed and private, of his wish to stop writing for the periodicals and reach a larger audience through the medium of published books. Among his earliest submissions to a commercial publisher was a collection to be called “Seven Tales of My Native Land.” In the years that followed, he proposed additional volumes of the sort, including one entitled “Provincial Tales” and another “The Story-Teller.” Some of the short pieces published during this period appear in groups, under such headings as “Old News” and “Legends of the Province House.” Two more unrealized collections bore the titles “Allegories of the Heart” and “Old Time Legends” (one of his proposed solutions to the problem of packaging The Scarlet Letter). This desire and need to publish books was partially satisfied by successive collections of his short pieces: Twice-Told Tales, in 1837, with an expanded edition five years later, and Mosses from an Old Manse, in 1846. What he really wanted, however, was a full-blown novel. “The Old Manse” closes with his regret at having failed to produce one during his time there, and “Ethan Brand,” written the same year as The Scarlet Letter, is subtitled “A Chapter from an Abortive Romance.”
What enabled The Scarlet Letter to outgrow Hawthorne’s previous tales and become what today’s readers, at any rate, have no trouble thinking of as a full-fledged novel seems clear enough when we compare it to those earlier stories. There, the symbols for the problems to be solved—the devil’s book, a black veil,
a cave, poison, a bloody hand—forbid the sort of metamorphosis or reinterpretation that might make a solution possible. The letter A, on the other hand, can change its meaning as circumstances dictate or permit, from “adultress” to “able” or “angel”—to “amor,” perhaps, or even “art.” Embodied in a living child, the letter comes inevitably to mean different things as Pearl grows up and changes her mother’s feelings about her. For the first time in a Hawthorne story, the problem might become its own solution—sin its own means of redemption, poison its own antidote.
Then, too, in the tales, the central characters must choose between embracing apparent sin or preserving their supposed innocence, and can’t well be blamed for usually choosing what seems the safer path. Hester’s choice, on the other hand, lies irrevocably behind her. When the story opens, she has already sinned and, in effect, confessed. With nothing left to lose, no way of turning back, and no hope of outside help, either human or divine, she is free to embrace her sin, clasp it jealously to her bosom, and see where that may take her. In a sense, she gets to find out what really does lie beyond the devil’s altar shunned by Goodman Brown, behind the door of Major Molineux’s house, and down there in Rappaccini’s poisoned garden.
Driven as Hester may be to find a way out of the dark labyrinth into which guilty love has led her, the novel is no less so. It wants to discover what it does not yet know: how Hester, Dimmesdale, Pearl, Chillingworth, and the people of Boston, each of them estranged by Hester’s sin from all the rest, even from themselves, can be brought together on the ground of some truth less vulnerable to human frailty than the dream of sinlessness—that is, how the scarlet letter that divides them all from one another can become The Scarlet Letter, wherein they are all united.
What the novel learns in this regard, if indeed it can be said to learn something, Hawthorne’s readers must be left to decide for themselves. Written entirely in the emblematic style of the solitary man conversing with his own mind and heart, the story has lent itself, over the years, to countless interpretations, most of them divided according to whose story it is understood to be, Hester’s or Dimmesdale’s. In every case, though, readers have agreed with Hawthorne that “certainly, there [is] some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, . . . subtly communicating itself to [the] sensibilities but evading the analysis of [the] mind.” Wherever the potent talisman appears, on Hester’s bosom, in Pearl’s finery, in the midnight sky, on Dimmesdale’s breast, on the single headstone over the graves of the still separated couple, revealed there is the secret of The Scarlet Letter “—all written in this symbol,—all plainly manifest,—” were there “a prophet or a magician skilled to read the character of flame!”
Conclusively interpretable or not, Hawthorne’s art here is prodigious. Never before or since in the history of fiction in English, from Defoe to DeLillo, has there appeared anything quite like The Scarlet Letter, whose every word bears such a weight of compacted meaning, none of whose sentences can be seen coming but each of which seems inevitable when it arrives, whose every chapter promises a revelation that never quite comes fully to light. Nowhere in the book is there a shred of padding, a descriptive passage or piece of dialogue that fails to prove ultimately significant, a detail not sprung directly from the hidden motive of the action and pointed directly, if enigmatically, back at it. No prose ever written, it may safely be said, comes closer to meeting the strictest definition of poetry.
A person to be writing a tale, and to find that it shapes itself against his intentions; that the characters act otherwise than he thought; that unforeseen events occur; and a catastrophe comes which he strives in vain to avert. It might shadow forth his own fate—he having made himself one of the personages.
FROM THE AMERICAN NOTEBOOKS
I
THE PRISON-DOOR
A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.
The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison. In accordance with this rule, it may safely be assumed that the forefathers of Boston had built the first prison-house, somewhere in the vicinity of Cornhill, almost as seasonably as they marked out the first burial-ground, on Isaac Johnson’s lot, and round about his grave, which subsequently became the nucleus of all the congregated sepulchres in the old church-yard of King’s Chapel. Certain it is, that, some fifteen or twenty years after the settlement of the town, the wooden jail was already marked with weather-stains and other indications of age, which gave a yet darker aspect to its beetle-browed and gloomy front. The rust on the ponderous iron-work of its oaken door looked more antique than any thing else in the new world. Like all that pertains to crime, it seemed never to have known a youthful era. Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pig-weed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept alive in history; but whether it had merely survived out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed it,—or whether, as there is fair authority for believing, it had sprung up under the foot-steps of the sainted Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door, —we shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.
II
THE MARKET-PLACE
The grass-plot before the jail, in Prison Lane, on a certain summer morning, not less than two centuries ago, was occupied by a pretty large number of the inhabitants of Boston; all with their eyes intently fastened on the iron-clamped oaken door. Amongst any other population, or at a later period in the history of New England, the grim rigidity that petrified the bearded physiognomies of these good people would have augured some awful business in hand. It could have betokened nothing short of the anticipated execution of some noted culprit, on whom the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment. But, in that early severity of the Puritan character, an inference of this kind could not so indubitably be drawn. It might be that a sluggish bond-servant, or an undutiful child, whom his parents had given over to the civil authority, was to be corrected at the whipping-post. It might be, that an Antinomian, a Quaker, or other heterodox religionist, was to be scourged out of the town, or an idle and vagrant Indian, whom the white man’s fire-water had made riotous about the streets, was to be driven with stripes into the shadow of the forest. It might be, too, that a witch, like old Mistress Hibbins, the bitter-tempered widow of the magistrate, was to die upon the gallows. In either case, there was very much the same solemnity of demeanour on the part of the spectators; as befitted a people amongst whom religion and law were almost identical, and in whose character both were so thoroughly interfused, that the mildest and the severest acts of public discipline were alike made venerable and awful. Meagre, indeed, and cold, was the sympathy that a transgressor mig
ht look for, from such bystanders at the scaffold. On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.
It was a circumstance to be noted, on the summer morning when our story begins its course, that the women, of whom there were several in the crowd, appeared to take a peculiar interest in whatever penal infliction might be expected to ensue. The age had not so much refinement, that any sense of impropriety restrained the wearers of petticoat and farthingale from stepping forth into the public ways, and wedging their not unsubstantial persons, if occasion were, into the throng nearest to the scaffold at an execution. Morally, as well as materially, there was a coarser fibre in those wives and maidens of old English birth and breeding, than in their fair descendants, separated from them by a series of six or seven generations; for, throughout that chain of ancestry, every successive mother has transmitted to her child a fainter bloom, a more delicate and briefer beauty, and a slighter physical frame, if not a character of less force and solidity, than her own. The women, who were now standing about the prison-door, stood within less than half a century of the period when the man-like Elizabeth had been the not altogether unsuitable representative of the sex. They were her countrywomen; and the beef and ale of their native land, with a moral diet not a whit more refined, entered largely into their composition. The bright morning sun, therefore, shone on broad shoulders and well-developed busts, and on round and ruddy cheeks, that had ripened in the far-off island, and had hardly yet grown paler or thinner in the atmosphere of New England. There was, moreover, a boldness and rotundity of speech among these matrons, as most of them seemed to be, that would startle us at the present day, whether in respect to its purport or its volume of tone.
The Portable Hawthorne (Penguin Classics) Page 18