Ch. 5 - The Three American Novels

The prospect of official station and emolument which Hawthorne
mentions in one of those paragraphs from his Journals which I have
just quoted, as having offered itself and then passed away, was at
last, in the event, confirmed by his receiving from the administration
of President Polk the gift of a place in the Custom-house of his
native town. The office was a modest one, and "official station" may
perhaps appear a magniloquent formula for the functions sketched in
the admirable Introduction to The _Scarlet Letter_. Hawthorne's duties
were those of Surveyor of the port of Salem, and they had a salary
attached, which was the important part; as his biographer tells us
that he had received almost nothing for the contributions to the
_Democratic Review_. He bade farewell to his ex-parsonage and went
back to Salem in 1846, and the immediate effect of his ameliorated
fortune was to make him stop writing. None of his Journals of the
period from his going to Salem to 1850 have been published; from which
I infer that he even ceased to journalise. _The Scarlet Letter_ was
not written till 1849. In the delightful prologue to that work,
entitled _The Custom-house_, he embodies some of the impressions
gathered during these years of comparative leisure (I say of leisure
because he does not intimate in this sketch of his occupations that
his duties were onerous). He intimates, however, that they were not
interesting, and that it was a very good thing for him, mentally and
morally, when his term of service expired--or rather when he was
removed from office by the operation of that wonderful "rotatory"
system which his countrymen had invented for the administration of
their affairs. This sketch of the Custom-house is, as simple writing,
one of the most perfect of Hawthorne's compositions, and one of the
most gracefully and humorously autobiographic. It would be interesting
to examine it in detail, but I prefer to use my space for making some
remarks upon the work which was the ultimate result of this period of
Hawthorne's residence in his native town; and I shall, for
convenience' sake, say directly afterwards what I have to say about
the two companions of _The Scarlet Letter_--_The House of the Seven
Gables_ and _The Blithedale Romance_. I quoted some passages from the
prologue to the first of these novels in the early pages of this
essay. There is another passage, however, which bears particularly
upon this phase of Hawthorne's career, and which is so happily
expressed as to make it a pleasure to transcribe it--the passage in
which he says that "for myself, during the whole of my Custom-house
experience, moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of the fire-light,
were just alike in my regard, and neither