And Hester Prynne had returned, and taken up her long-forsaken shame. But where was little Pearl? If still alive, she must now have been in the flush and bloom of early womanhood. None knew—nor ever learned, with the fulness of perfect certainty—whether the elf-child had gone thus untimely to a maiden grave; or whether her wild, rich nature had been softened and subdued, and made capable of a woman’s gentle happiness. But, through the remainder of Hester’s life, there were indications that the recluse of the scarlet letter was the object of love and interest with some inhabitant of another land. Letters came, with armorial seals upon them, though of bearings unknown to English heraldry. In the cottage there were articles of comfort and luxury, such as Hester never cared to use, but which only wealth could have purchased, and affection have imagined for her. There were trifles, too, little ornaments, beautiful tokens of a continual remembrance, that must have been wrought by delicate fingers, at the impulse of a fond heart. And, once, Hester was seen embroidering a baby-garment, with such a lavish richness of golden fancy as would have raised a public tumult, had any infant, thus apparelled, been shown to our sombre-hued community.
In fine, the gossips of that day believed,—and Mr. Surveyor Pue, who made investigations a century later, believed,—and one of his recent successors in office, moreover, faithfully believes,—that Pearl was not only alive, but married, and happy, and mindful of her mother; and that she would most joyfully have entertained that sad and lonely mother at her fireside.
But there was a more real life for Hester Prynne, here, in New England, than in that unknown region where Pearl had found a home. Here had been her sin; here, her sorrow; and here was yet to be her penitence. She had returned, therefore, and resumed,—of her own free will, for not the sternest magistrate of that iron period would have imposed it,—resumed the symbol of which we have related so dark a tale. Never afterwards did it quit her bosom. But, in the lapse of the toilsome, thoughtful, and self-devoted years that made up Hester’s life, the scarlet letter ceased to be a stigma which attracted the world’s scorn and bitterness, and became a type of something to be sorrowed over, and looked upon with awe, yet with reverence too. And, as Hester Prynne had no selfish ends, nor lived in any measure for her own profit and enjoyment, people brought all their sorrows and perplexities, and besought her counsel, as one who had herself gone through a mighty trouble. Women, more especially,—in the continually recurring trials of wounded, wasted, wronged, misplaced, or erring and sinful passion,—or with the dreary burden of a heart unyielded, because unvalued and unsought,—came to Hester’s cottage, demanding why they were so wretched, and what the remedy! Hester comforted and counselled them, as best she might. She assured them, too, of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven’s own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness. Earlier in life, Hester had vainly imagined that she herself might be the destined prophetess, but had long since recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but the ethereal medium of joy; and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such an end!
So said Hester Prynne, and glanced her sad eyes downward at the scarlet letter. And, after many, many years, a new grave was delved, near an old and sunken one, in that burial-ground beside which King’s Chapel has since been built. It was near that old and sunken grave, yet with a space between, as if the dust of the two sleepers had no right to mingle. Yet one tombstone served for both. All around, there were monuments carved with armorial bearings; and on this simple slab of slate—as the curious investigator may still discern, and perplex himself with the purport—there appeared the semblance of an engraved escutcheon. It bore a device, a herald’s wording of which might serve for a motto and brief description of our now concluded legend; so sombre is it, and relieved only by one ever-glowing point of light gloomier than the shadow:—
“ON A FIEld, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULEs.”
THE END.
III
THE PUBLISHED ROMANCES 1851-1860
EDITOR’S NOTE
The welcome, if unexpected, success of The Scarlet Letter freed Hawthorne to write full-length romances for the more lucrative, more prestigious book trade. Not only would the money help to support his growing family; by improving his professional reputation, he might secure a political appointment even less onerous than the one he had recently lost at the Salem Custom House. He may also have had a less prudential motive for writing no more tales: a disinclination to risk another Scarlet Letter, which appears to have taught him a Truth, all right, but nothing like the one for which he had been emblematically searching or one that he could bring himself to acknowledge, let alone embrace.
Be that as it may, his decision to write only romances required a number of adjustments in his fictional methods. To “open an intercourse with the world,” as he put it, he would have to lay aside his by now habitual idea of fiction as “the written communications of a solitary mind with itself” and speak more openly to his audience in “the style of a man of society.” To get around American readers’ often-noted impatience with implausibilities, his typically hallucinatory settings and preternatural doings would have to give way to more recognizable situations and more credible events. To fill an entire volume, the sort of story he was used to telling would have to be stretched and expanded, somehow—hopefully with material that his readers would find entertaining and germane. And to meet the popular demand for moral clarity, he would have to control the course of events more carefully than he had before, so as to bring the story to an unambiguous, reassuring conclusion.
Under these demands, Hawthorne wrote The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, in the two years immediately following The Scarlet Letter, and The Marble Faun, at the end of his European sojourn, eight years later. In all three cases, the effects are painfully evident. Concerned to avoid puzzling, and hence excluding, the reader, the most suggestive emblems in evidence—Hepzibah’s scowl and turban, Zenobia’s flower, Westervelt’s gold teeth, Donatello’s ears—have little or no bearing on the moral outcome of the story. Instead of pondering the possible significance of such emblems, the three narrators busy themselves with supplying what Hawthorne elsewhere called “the side-scenes, and backgrounds, and exterior ornament” of the action. Most of this material is drawn not from his once fertile imagination but from his familiarity with Salem, his memories of Brook Farm, and the journals he kept in Italy; and much of that is quite inessential to the stories being told, which could about as well happen elsewhere or nowhere in particular. With an eye to keeping the reader entertained while avoiding any danger of running into a moral swamp, all three romances follow much the same formula, employing the same character types to act out the same fixed contest between guilt and innocence.
Lacking any internal motives to drive them onward and direct their progress, and repeatedly interrupted by largely irrelevant side matters, the three stories all lose their way at some point, usually because one or more of the characters refuses to keep within his or her assigned role. When that happens, someone may tell a tale, like “Alice Pyncheon” or “Lord Fauntleroy” or the “Myths” of Monte Beni, aimed at clarifying the drift of the action by assembling its scattered elements in a form and a setting more amenable to emblematizing and less beholden to demands for plausibility. The emblems involved, however, seem arbitrarily chosen, rather than dictated by the main story; and so these interpolated tales end up accomplishing little beyond the filling of a few more pages. To set things straight, the author himself must step in and dispatch the troublemaker so that the company may be arranged in a closing
tableau appropriate to the desired moral.
It must be said that this assessment of the published romances is not Hawthorne’s. He thought The House of the Seven Gables an improvement on The Scarlet Letter, and The Marble Faun quite the best thing he had ever written. Nor does it square with the views held by generations of his readers, including some of his ablest critics. The time has passed, however, when anything with Hawthorne’s name on it could be assumed a work of genius because a genius wrote The Scarlet Letter. Mark Twain often thought Joan of Arc his best book. Must we admire it as well, because the author of Huckleberry Finn wrote it? After The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s fiction shows a steep, accelerating decline in moral force, largely, it seems, because he had lost faith in the genre as anything but a form of moral entertainment and a source of income. As a result, the romances remain of interest only because he wrote them, which is to say, biographically, as milestones on the path of his later career, or historically, as clues to the circumstances in which they arose.
And yet we may count ourselves lucky that the romances do wear their authorial life-belts; for they contain, among their many sad stumblings, plentiful instances of Hawthorne’s seldom equaled prose. Nor should we be too quick to judge his reluctance or inability to enter the desanctified world pointed out to him by The Scarlet Letter. Of his many contemporaries who faced similar disillusionments, perhaps only one, Herman Melville, consented to leave his public behind and go on alone in the world revealed to him by his art. We may lament Hawthorne’s “failure of nerve,” but, unsure that we ourselves would have been more resolute, we can hardly condemn or fail to understand it.
While one can hear occasional, faint echoes of Hawthorne’s earlier fiction in these romances, only once, really, does the prose give off that sound of another meaning, so familiar from the tales and The Scarlet Letter. And that comes early in both The House of the Seven Gables and Hawthorne’s new career as a professional romancer, when Hepzibah emerges from the heartlike house where she has been long immured, to become “the hucksteress of a cent-shop.” These introductory chapters fairly beg to be understood as a meditation upon the doubts and humiliations entailed in abandoning a secluded life in the cavern of the heart to open a commercial intercourse with the world on its own terms—an undertaking, “Hepzibah began to fear, that . . . would prove her ruin . . . without contributing very essentially to even her temporal welfare.”
Of the passages transcribed below, the first, from The House of the Seven Gables, describes the association of two of its main characters—sunny, young Phoebe and melancholy, old Clifford—in terms that make it seem a meditation on the author’s own marriage. The second excerpt, from The Blithedale Romance, records the narrator’s first impressions of life in the utopian community. The third, from The Marble Faun, dramatizes the central question of the romance: whether Donatello’s love-inspired fall from innocence might have any but the direst consequences.
I do not find that these associations of real scenes with fictitious events greatly heighten the charm of them.
—FROM THE EUROPEAN JOURNALS
FROM THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES 1851
Phoebe, it is probable, had but a very imperfect comprehension of the character, over which she had thrown so beneficent a spell. Nor was it necessary. The fire upon the hearth can gladden a whole semi-circle of faces roundabout it, but need not know the individuality of one among them all. Indeed, there was something too fine and delicate in Clifford’s traits, to be perfectly appreciated by one whose sphere lay so much in the Actual as Phoebe’s did. For Clifford, however, the reality, and simplicity, and thorough homeliness of the girl’s nature, were as powerful a charm as any that she possessed. Beauty, it is true, and beauty almost perfect in its own style, was indispensable. Had Phoebe been coarse in feature, shaped clumsily, of a harsh voice, and uncouthly mannered, she might have been rich with all good gifts, beneath this unfortunate exterior; and still, so long as she wore the guise of woman, she would have shocked Clifford and depressed him by her lack of beauty. But nothing more beautiful—nothing prettier, at least—was ever made, than Phoebe. And, therefore, to this man—whose whole poor and impalpable enjoyment of existence, heretofore, and until both his heart and fancy died within him, had been a dream—whose images of women had more and more lost their warmth and substance, and been frozen, like the pictures of secluded artists, into the chillest ideality—to him, this little figure of the cheeriest household-life was just what he required, to bring him back into the breathing world. Persons who have wandered, or been expelled, out of the common track of things, even were it for a better system, desire nothing so much as to be led back. They shiver in their loneliness, be it on a mountain-top or in a dungeon. Now, Phoebe’s presence made a home about her—that very sphere which the outcast, the prisoner, the potentate, the wretch beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above it, instinctively pines after—a home! She was real! Holding her hand, you felt something; a tender something; a substance; and a warm one; and so long as you should feel its grasp, soft as it was, you might be certain that your place was good in the whole sympathetic chain of human nature. The world was no longer a delusion.
By looking a little farther in this direction, we might suggest an explanation of an often suggested mystery. Why are poets so apt to choose their mates, not for any similarity of poetic endowment, but for qualities which might make the happiness of the rudest handicraftsman, as well as that of the ideal craftsman of the spirit? Because, probably, at his highest elevation, the poet needs no human intercourse; but he finds it dreary to descend, and be a stranger.
There was something very beautiful in the relation that grew up between this pair; so closely and constantly linked together, yet with such a waste of gloomy and mysterious years from his birth-day to hers. On Clifford’s part, it was the feeling of a man naturally endowed with the liveliest sensibility to feminine influence, but who had never quaffed the cup of passionate love, and knew that it was now too late. He knew it, with the instinctive delicacy that had survived his intellectual decay. Thus, his sentiment for Phoebe, without being paternal, was not less chaste than if she had been his daughter. He was a man, it is true, and recognized her as a woman. She was his only representative of womankind. He took unfailing note of every charm that appertained to her sex, and saw the ripeness of her lips, and the virginal development of her bosom. All her little, womanly ways, budding out of her like blossoms on a young fruit-tree, had their effect on him, and sometimes caused his very heart to tingle with the keenest thrills of pleasure. At such moments—for the effect was seldom more than momentary—the half-torpid man would be full of harmonious life, just as a long-silent harp is full of sound, when the musician’s fingers sweep across it. But, after all, it seemed rather a perception, or a sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He read Phoebe, as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her, as if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him, to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he had lacked on earth, brought warmly home to his conception; so that this mere symbol or lifelike picture had almost the comfort of reality.
But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos, with which it impresses us, is attainable. This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing to be happy—his tendencies so hideously thwarted, that, some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now imbecile—this poor, forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung, by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbor. There, as he lay more than half-lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odors will, had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all th
e living and breathing beauty, amid which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight, ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires!
And how did Phoebe regard Clifford? The girl’s was not one of those natures which are most attracted by what is strange and exceptional in human character. The path, which would best have suited her, was the well-worn track of ordinary life; the companions, in whom she would most have delighted, were such as one encounters at every turn. The mystery which enveloped Clifford, so far as it affected her at all, was an annoyance, rather than the piquant charm which many women might have found in it. Still, her native kindliness was brought strongly into play, not by what was darkly picturesque in his situation, nor so much even by the finer grace of his character, as by the simple appeal of a heart so forlorn as his, to one so full of genuine sympathy as hers. She gave him an affectionate regard, because he needed so much love, and seemed to have received so little. With a ready tact, the result of ever-active and wholesome sensibility, she discerned what was good for him, and did it. Whatever was morbid in his mind and experience, she ignored, and thereby kept their intercourse healthy by the incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole conduct. The sick in mind, and perhaps in body, are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so, by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters, in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of purer air. She impregnated it, too, not with a wild-flower scent—for wildness was no trait of hers—but with the perfume of garden-roses, pinks, and other blossoms of much sweetness, which nature and man have consented together in making grow, from summer to summer, and from century to century. Such a flower was Phoebe, in her relation with Clifford, and such the delight that he inhaled from her.
The Portable Hawthorne (Penguin Classics) Page 39