THE SCARLET LETTER & A SCARLET STIGMA (Illustrated). Nathaniel Hawthorne
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be restored.
"It has met with extraordinary success from that portion of the public to whose judgment it has been submitted: viz. from my wife. I likewise prefer it to 'The Scarlet Letter;' but an author's opinion of his book, just after completing it, is worth little or nothing; he being then in the hot or cold fit of a fever, and certain to rate it too high or too low. It has undoubtedly one disadvantage in being brought so close to the present time, whereby its romantic improbabilities become more glaring."
The fac simile of a part of the above letter which is reproduced here serves as a fairly good specimen of Hawthorne's handwriting. At the time when it was written, he was not very well, and the fatigue of his long labor upon the book rendered the chirography somewhat less clear in this case than it often was. The lettering in his manuscripts was somewhat larger, and was still more distinct than that in his correspondence.
After the new romance had come out and had met with a flattering reception, he inquired of Bridge (July 22, 1851): "Why did you not write and tell me how you liked (or how you did not like) 'The House of the Seven Gables?' Did you feel shy about expressing an unfavorable opinion? It would not have hurt me in the least, though I am always glad to please you; but I rather think I have reached the stage when I do not care very essentially one way or the other for anybody's opinion on any one production. On this last romance, for instance, I have heard and seen such diversity of judgment that I should be altogether bewildered if I attempted to strike a balance;—so I take nobody's estimate but my own. I think it is a work more characteristic of my mind, and more natural and proper for me to write, than 'The Scarlet Letter'—but for that very reason less likely to interest the public.... As long as people will buy, I shall keep at work, and I find that my facility of labor increases with the demand for it."
In the May of 1851 another daughter was added to his family. Hawthorne, like his father, had one son and two daughters. Of this youngest one he wrote to Pike, two months after her birth: "She is a very bright and healthy child.... I think I feel more interest in her than I did in the other children at the same age, from the consideration that she is to be the daughter of my age—the comfort (so it is to be hoped) of my declining years." There are some other interesting points in this communication. "What a sad account you give of your solitude, in your letter! I am not likely ever to have that feeling of loneliness which you express; and I most heartily wish you would take measures to remedy it in your own case, by marrying.... Whenever you find it quite intolerable (and I can hardly help wishing that it may become so soon), do come to me. By the way, if I continue to prosper as hitherto in the literary line, I shall soon be in a condition to buy a place; and if you should hear of one, say worth from $1,500 to $2,000, I wish you would keep your eye on it for me. I should wish it to be on the sea-coast, or at all events within easy access to the sea. Very little land would suit my purpose, but I want a good house, with space inside.... I find that I do not feel at home among these hills, and should not consider myself permanently settled here. I do not get acclimated to the peculiar state of the atmosphere; and, except in mid-winter, I am continually catching cold, and am never so vigorous as I used to be on the sea-coast.... Why did you not express your opinion of 'The House of the Seven Gables?'... I should receive friendly censure with just as much equanimity as if it were praise; though certainly I had rather you would like the book than not. At any rate, it has sold finely, and seems to have pleased a good many people better than the other; and I must confess that I myself am among the number.... When I write another romance I shall take the Community for a subject, and shall give some of my experiences at Brook Farm."
On the first day of December, 1851, he left Lenox with his wife and children, betaking himself for the winter to West Newton, a suburban village a few miles west of Boston, on the Charles River; there to remain until he could effect the purchase of a house which could serve him as a settled home. The house that he finally selected was an old one in the town of Concord, about a mile easterly from the centre of the village on the road to Lexington, and was then the property of Mrs. Bronson Alcott. During the winter at West Newton he wrote "The Blithedale Romance," which was published early in 1852. In the brief term of two years and a half from the moment of his leaving the Custom House at Salem, he had thus produced four books,—"The Scarlet Letter," "The House of the Seven Gables," "A Wonder-Book for Boys and Girls," and "The Blithedale Romance,"—three of them being the principal works of his lifetime, with which "The Marble Faun" alone stands in the same category. Early in the summer of 1852 he took up his residence in his new home, The Wayside, of which he thus discoursed to Mr. George William Curtis, on the 14th of July, 1852:—
My dear Howadji,—I think (and am glad to think) that you will find it necessary to come hither in order to write your Concord Sketches; and as for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestiveness about it and no venerableness, although from the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing it. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in forming the hill-side behind the house into terraces, and building arbors and summer-houses of rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hill-side is covered chiefly with locust-trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very sweetly, intermixed with a few young elms and some white-pines and infant oaks,—the whole forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is some very good shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy length, with a book in my hand or an unwritten book in my thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the sides or brow of the hill.
From the hill-top there is a good view along the extensive level surfaces and gentle, hilly outlines, covered with wood, that characterize the scenery of Concord. We have not so much as a gleam of lake or river in the prospect; if there were, it would add greatly to the value of the place in my estimation.
The house stands within ten or fifteen feet of the old Boston road (along which the British marched and retreated), divided from it by a fence, and some trees and shrubbery of Mr. Alcott's setting out. Whereupon I have called it "The Wayside," which I think a better name and more morally suggestive than that which, as Mr. Alcott has since told me, he bestowed on it,—"The Hill-Side." In front of the house, on the opposite side of the road, I have eight acres of land,—the only valuable portion of the place in a farmer's eye, and which are capable of being made very fertile. On the hither side, my territory extends some little distance over the brow of the hill, and is absolutely good for nothing, in a productive point of view, though very good for many other purposes.
I know nothing of the history of the house, except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabited a generation or two ago by a man who believed he should never die.[9] I believe, however, he is dead; at least, I hope so; else he may probably appear and dispute my title to his residence....
I asked Ticknor to send a copy of "The Blithedale Romance" to you. Do not read it as if it had anything to do with Brook Farm (which essentially it has not), but merely for its own story and character.
Truly yours, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Quite possibly the name of The Wayside recommended itself to him by some association of thought like that which comes to light in the Preface to "The Snow-Image," where, speaking of the years immediately following his college course, he says: "I sat down by the wayside 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." If so, the simile held good as to his home; for there, too, the shrubbery has sprung up and has grown to saplings and trees, until the house is embosomed in a wood, except for the opening along the road and a small amphitheatre of lawn overlooked by the evergreen-clad hill.
Hawthorne's old college friend, Franklin Pierce, after having been to Congress and