The Scarlet Letter
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Nathaniel Hawthorne >> The Scarlet Letter
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20 This etext was originally created at Dartmouth College, and has
been modified several times since then.
THE SCARLET LETTER
by Nathaniel Hawthorne
EDITOR'S NOTE
Nathaniel Hawthorne was already a man of forty-six, and a tale
writer of some twenty-four years' standing, when "The Scarlet
Letter" appeared. He was born at Salem, Mass., on July 4th, 1804,
son of a sea-captain. He led there a shy and rather sombre life;
of few artistic encouragements, yet not wholly uncongenial, his
moody, intensely meditative temperament being considered. Its
colours and shadows are marvelously reflected in his "Twice-Told
Tales" and other short stories, the product of his first literary
period. Even his college days at Bowdoin did not quite break
through his acquired and inherited reserve; but beneath it all,
his faculty of divining men and women was exercised with almost
uncanny prescience and subtlety. "The Scarlet Letter," which
explains as much of this unique imaginative art, as is to be
gathered from reading his highest single achievement, yet needs
to be ranged with his other writings, early and late, to have its
last effect. In the year that saw it published, he began "The
House of the Seven Gables," a later romance or prose-tragedy of
the Puritan-American community as he had himself known it--
defrauded of art and the joy of life, "starving for symbols" as
Emerson has it. Nathaniel Hawthorne died at Plymouth, New
Hampshire, on May 18th, 1864.
The following is the table of his romances,
stories, and other works:
Fanshawe, published anonymously, 1826; Twice-Told Tales, 1st
Series, 1837; 2nd Series, 1842; Grandfather's Chair, a history
for youth, 1845: Famous Old People (Grandfather's Chair), 1841
Liberty Tree: with the last words of Grandfather's Chair, 1842;
Biographical Stories for Children, 1842; Mosses from an Old
Manse, 1846; The Scarlet Letter, 1850; The House of the Seven
Gables, 1851: True Stories from History and Biography (the whole
History of Grandfather's Chair), 1851 A Wonder Book for Girls and
Boys, 1851; The Snow Image and other Tales, 1851: The Blithedale
Romance, 1852; Life of Franklin Pierce, 1852; Tanglewood Tales
(2nd Series of the Wonder Book), 1853; A Rill from the Town-Pump,
with remarks, by Telba, 1857; The Marble Faun; or, The Romance of
Monte Beni (4 EDITOR'S NOTE) (published in England under the
title of "Transformation"), 1860, Our Old Home, 1863; Dolliver
Romance (1st Part in "Atlantic Monthly"), 1864; in 3 Parts, 1876;
Pansie, a fragment, Hawthorne' last literary effort, 1864;
American Note-Books, 1868; English Note Books, edited by Sophia
Hawthorne, 1870; French and Italian Note Books, 1871; Septimius
Felton; or, the Elixir of Life (from the "Atlantic Monthly"),
1872; Doctor Grimshawe's Secret, with Preface and Notes by
Julian Hawthorne, 1882.
Tales of the White Hills, Legends of New England, Legends of the
Province House, 1877, contain tales which had already been
printed in book form in "Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses"
"Sketched and Studies," 1883.
Hawthorne's contributions to magazines were numerous, and most of
his tales appeared first in periodicals, chiefly in "The Token,"
1831-1838, "New England Magazine," 1834,1835; "Knickerbocker,"
1837-1839; "Democratic Review," 1838-1846; "Atlantic Monthly,"
1860-1872 (scenes from the Dolliver Romance, Septimius Felton,
and passages from Hawthorne's Note-Books).
Works: in 24 volumes, 1879; in 12 volumes, with introductory
notes by Lathrop, Riverside Edition, 1883.
Biography, etc.; A. H. Japp (pseud. H. A. Page), Memoir of N.
Hawthorne, 1872; J. T. Field's "Yesterdays with Authors," 1873 G.
P. Lathrop, "A Study of Hawthorne," 1876; Henry James English Men
of Letters, 1879; Julian Hawthorne, "Nathaniel Hawthorne and his
wife," 1885; Moncure D. Conway, Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne,
1891; Analytical Index of Hawthorne's Works, by E. M. O'Connor
1882.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY. THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
CHAPTER I. THE PRISON-DOOR
CHAPTER II. THE MARKET-PLACE
CHAPTER III. THE RECOGNITION
CHAPTER IV. THE INTERVIEW
CHAPTER V. HESTER AT HER NEEDLE
CHAPTER VI. PEARL
CHAPTER VII. THE GOVERNOR'S HALL
CHAPTER VIII. THE ELF-CHILD AND THE MINISTER
CHAPTER IX. THE LEECH
CHAPTER X. THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT
CHAPTER XI. THE INTERIOR OF A HEART
CHAPTER XII. THE MINISTER'S VIGIL
CHAPTER XIII. ANOTHER VIEW OF HESTER
CHAPTER XIV. HESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN
CHAPTER XV. HESTER AND PEARL
CHAPTER XVI. A FOREST WALK
CHAPTER XVII. THE PASTOR AND HIS PARISHIONER
CHAPTER XVIII. A FLOOD OF SUNSHINE
CHAPTER XIX. THE CHILD AT THE BROOK-SIDE
CHAPTER XX. THE MINISTER IN A MAZE
CHAPTER XXI. THE NEW ENGLAND HOLIDAY
CHAPTER XXII. THE PROCESSION
CHAPTER XXIII. THE REVELATION OF THE SCARLET LETTER
CHAPTER XXIV. CONCLUSION
THE CUSTOM-HOUSE
INTRODUCTORY TO "THE SCARLET LETTER"
It is a little remarkable, that--though disinclined to talk
overmuch of myself and my affairs at the fireside, and to my
personal friends--an autobiographical impulse should twice in my
life have taken possession of me, in addressing the public. The
first time was three or four years since, when I favoured the
reader--inexcusably, and for no earthly reason that either the
indulgent reader or the intrusive author could imagine--with a
description of my way of life in the deep quietude of an Old
Manse. And now--because, beyond my deserts, I was happy enough
to find a listener or two on the former occasion--I again seize
the public by the button, and talk of my three years' experience
in a Custom-House. The example of the famous "P. P., Clerk of
this Parish," was never more faithfully followed. The truth
seems to be, however, that when he casts his leaves forth upon
the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling
aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will
understand him better than most of his schoolmates or lifemates.
Some authors, indeed, do far more than this, and indulge
themselves in such confidential depths of revelation as could
fittingly be addressed only and exclusively to the one heart and
mind of perfect sympathy; as if the printed book, thrown at
large on the wide world, were certain to find out the divided
segment of the writer's own nature, and complete his circle of
existence by bringing him into communion with it. It is scarcely
decorous, however, to speak all, even where we speak
impersonally. But, as thoughts are frozen and utterance
benumbed, unless the speaker stand in some true relation with
his audience, it may be pardonable to imagine that a friend, a
kind and apprehensive, though not the closest friend, is
listening to our talk; and then, a native reserve being thawed
by this genial consciousness, we may prate of the circumstances
that lie around us, and even of ourself, but still keep the
inmost Me behind its veil. To this extent, and within these
limits, an author, methinks, may be autobiographical, without
violating either the reader's rights or his own.
It will be seen, likewise, that this Custom-House sketch has a
certain propriety, of a kind always recognised in literature, as
explaining how a large portion of the following pages came into
my possession, and as offering proofs of the authenticity of a
narrative therein contained. This, in fact--a desire to put
myself in my true position as editor, or very little more, of
the most prolix among the tales that make up my volume--this,
and no other, is my true reason for assuming a personal relation
with the public. In accomplishing the main purpose, it has
appeared allowable, by a few extra touches, to give a faint
representation of a mode of life not heretofore described,
together with some of the characters that move in it, among whom
the author happened to make one.
In my native town of Salem, at the head of what, half a century
ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf--but
which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and
exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps,
a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging
hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out
her cargo of firewood--at the head, I say, of this dilapidated
wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at the
base and in the rear of the row of buildings, the track of many
languid years is seen in a border of unthrifty grass--here, with
a view from its front windows adown this not very enlivening
prospect, and thence across the harbour, stands a spacious
edifice of brick. From the loftiest point of its roof, during
precisely three and a half hours of each forenoon, floats or
droops, in breeze or calm, the banner of the republic; but with
the thirteen stripes turned vertically, instead of horizontally,
and thus indicating that a civil, and not a military, post of
Uncle Sam's government is here established. Its front is
ornamented with a portico of half-a-dozen wooden pillars,
supporting a balcony, beneath which a flight of wide granite
steps descends towards the street. Over the entrance hovers an
enormous specimen of the American eagle, with outspread wings, a
shield before her breast, and, if I recollect aright, a bunch of
intermingled thunderbolts and barbed arrows in each claw. With
the customary infirmity of temper that characterizes this
unhappy fowl, she appears by the fierceness of her beak and eye,
and the general truculency of her attitude, to threaten mischief
to the inoffensive community; and especially to warn all
citizens careful of their safety against intruding on the
premises which she overshadows with her wings. Nevertheless,
vixenly as she looks, many people are seeking at this very
moment to shelter themselves under the wing of the federal
eagle; imagining, I presume, that her bosom has all the softness
and snugness of an eiderdown pillow. But she has no great
tenderness even in her best of moods, and, sooner or
later--oftener soon than late--is apt to fling off her nestlings
with a scratch of her claw, a dab of her beak, or a rankling
wound from her barbed arrows.
The pavement round about the above-described edifice--which we
may as well name at once as the Custom-House of the port--has
grass enough growing in its chinks to show that it has not, of
late days, been worn by any multitudinous resort of business. In
some months of the year, however, there often chances a forenoon
when affairs move onward with a livelier tread. Such occasions
might remind the elderly citizen of that period, before the last
war with England, when Salem was a port by itself; not scorned,
as she is now, by her own merchants and ship-owners, who permit
her wharves to crumble to ruin while their ventures go to swell,
needlessly and imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at
New York or Boston. On some such morning, when three or four
vessels happen to have arrived at once usually from Africa or
South America--or to be on the verge of their departure
thitherward, there is a sound of frequent feet passing briskly
up and down the granite steps. Here, before his own wife has
greeted him, you may greet the sea-flushed ship-master, just in
port, with his vessel's papers under his arm in a tarnished tin
box. Here, too, comes his owner, cheerful, sombre, gracious or
in the sulks, accordingly as his scheme of the now accomplished
voyage has been realized in merchandise that will readily be
turned to gold, or has buried him under a bulk of incommodities
such as nobody will care to rid him of. Here, likewise--the germ
of the wrinkle-browed, grizzly-bearded, careworn merchant--we
have the smart young clerk, who gets the taste of traffic as a
wolf-cub does of blood, and already sends adventures in his
master's ships, when he had better be sailing mimic boats upon a
mill-pond. Another figure in the scene is the outward-bound
sailor, in quest of a protection; or the recently arrived one,
pale and feeble, seeking a passport to the hospital. Nor must we
forget the captains of the rusty little schooners that bring
firewood from the British provinces; a rough-looking set of
tarpaulins, without the alertness of the Yankee aspect, but
contributing an item of no slight importance to our decaying
trade.
Cluster all these individuals together, as they sometimes were,
with other miscellaneous ones to diversify the group, and, for
the time being, it made the Custom-House a stirring scene. More
frequently, however, on ascending the steps, you would discern--
in the entry if it were summer time, or in their appropriate
rooms if wintry or inclement weathers--a row of venerable
figures, sitting in old-fashioned chairs, which were tipped on
their hind legs back against the wall. Oftentimes they were
asleep, but occasionally might be heard talking together, in
voices between a speech and a snore, and with that lack of
energy that distinguishes the occupants of alms-houses, and all
other human beings who depend for subsistence on charity, on
monopolized labour, or anything else but their own independent
exertions. These old gentlemen--seated, like Matthew at the
receipt of custom, but not very liable to be summoned thence,
like him, for apostolic errands--were Custom-House officers.
Furthermore, on the left hand as you enter the front door, is a
certain room or office, about fifteen feet square, and of a
lofty height, with two of its arched windows commanding a view
of the aforesaid dilapidated wharf, and the third looking across
a narrow lane, and along a portion of Derby Street. All three
give glimpses of the shops of grocers, block-makers,
slop-sellers, and ship-chandlers, around the doors of which are
generally to be seen, laughing and gossiping, clusters of old
salts, and such other wharf-rats as haunt the Wapping of a
seaport. The room itself is cobwebbed, and dingy with old paint;
its floor is strewn with grey sand, in a fashion that has
elsewhere fallen into long disuse; and it is easy to conclude,
from the general slovenliness of the place, that this is a
sanctuary into which womankind, with her tools of magic, the
broom and mop, has very infrequent access. In the way of
furniture, there is a stove with a voluminous funnel; an old
pine desk with a three-legged stool beside it; two or three
wooden-bottom chairs, exceedingly decrepit and infirm; and--not
to forget the library--on some shelves, a score or two of
volumes of the Acts of Congress, and a bulky Digest of the
Revenue laws. A tin pipe ascends through the ceiling, and forms
a medium of vocal communication with other parts of the edifice.
And here, some six months ago--pacing from corner to corner, or
lounging on the long-legged stool, with his elbow on the desk,
and his eyes wandering up and down the columns of the morning
newspaper--you might have recognised, honoured reader, the same
individual who welcomed you into his cheery little study, where
the sunshine glimmered so pleasantly through the willow branches
on the western side of the Old Manse. But now, should you go
thither to seek him, you would inquire in vain for the Locofoco
Surveyor. The besom of reform hath swept him out of office, and
a worthier successor wears his dignity and pockets his
emoluments.
This 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 affection, the force of which I
have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here.
Indeed, so far as its physical aspect is concerned, 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 alms-house 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 family has stuck 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 settlement which has since become a city. And
here his descendants have been born and died, and have mingled
their earthly substance 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 reference
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 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 dry old 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 cruelties; or whether they are now groaning under the
heavy consequences 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 recognise as laudable; no
success of mine--if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever
been brightened by success--would they deem otherwise than
worthless, if not positively disgraceful. "What is he?" murmurs
one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. "A writer of
story books! What kind of 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
subsisted 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,
performing 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 to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the
sea; a grey-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 tempestuous manhood, and returned from his
world-wanderings, to grow old, and die, and mingle his dust with
the natal earth. This long connexion 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 embedded. 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 survives, 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 mould of features and
cast of character which had all along been familiar here--ever,
as one representative of the race lay down in the grave, another
assuming, as it were, his sentry-march along the main
street--might still in my little day be seen and recognised in
the old town. Nevertheless, this very sentiment is an evidence
that the connexion, which has become an unhealthy one, should at
last be severed. Human nature will not flourish, any more than
a potato, if it be planted and re-planted, 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.
On emerging from the Old Manse, it was chiefly this strange,
indolent, unjoyous attachment for my native town that brought me
to fill a place in Uncle Sam's brick edifice, when I might as
well, or better, have gone somewhere else. My doom was on me. It
was not the first time, nor the second, that I had gone away--as
it seemed, permanently--but yet returned, like the bad
halfpenny, or as if Salem were for me the inevitable centre of
the universe. So, one fine morning I ascended the flight of
granite steps, with the President's commission in my pocket, and
was introduced to the corps of gentlemen who were to aid me in
my weighty responsibility as chief executive officer of the
Custom-House.
I doubt greatly--or, rather, I do not doubt at all--whether any
public functionary of the United States, either in the civil or
military line, has ever had such a patriarchal body of veterans
under his orders as myself. The whereabouts of the Oldest
Inhabitant was at once settled when I looked at them. For
upwards of twenty years before this epoch, the independent
position of the Collector had kept the Salem Custom-House out of
the whirlpool of political vicissitude, which makes the tenure
of office generally so fragile. A soldier--New England's most
distinguished soldier--he stood firmly on the pedestal of his
gallant services; and, himself secure in the wise liberality of
the successive administrations through which he had held office,
he had been the safety of his subordinates in many an hour of
danger and heart-quake. General Miller was radically
conservative; a man over whose kindly nature habit had no slight
influence; attaching himself strongly to familiar faces, and
with difficulty moved to change, even when change might have
brought unquestionable improvement. Thus, on taking charge of my
department, I found few but aged men. They were ancient
sea-captains, for the most part, who, after being tossed on
every sea, and standing up sturdily against life's tempestuous
blast, had finally drifted into this quiet nook, where, with
little to disturb them, except the periodical terrors of a
Presidential election, they one and all acquired a new lease of
existence. Though by no means less liable than their fellow-men
to age and infirmity, they had evidently some talisman or other
that kept death at bay. Two or three of their number, as I was
assured, being gouty and rheumatic, or perhaps bed-ridden, never
dreamed of making their appearance at the Custom-House during a
large part of the year; but, after a torpid winter, would creep
out into the warm sunshine of May or June, go lazily about what
they termed duty, and, at their own leisure and convenience,
betake themselves to bed again. I must plead guilty to the
charge of abbreviating the official breath of more than one of
these venerable servants of the republic. They were allowed, on
my representation, to rest from their arduous labours, and soon
afterwards--as if their sole principle of life had been zeal for
their country's service--as I verily believe it was--withdrew to
a better world. It is a pious consolation to me that, through my
interference, a sufficient space was allowed them for repentance
of the evil and corrupt practices into which, as a matter of
course, every Custom-House officer must be supposed to fall.
Neither the front nor the back entrance of the Custom-House
opens on the road to Paradise.
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