Ch. 5 - The Three American Novels - Page 2

of them was of one whit more
avail than the twinkle of a tallow candle. An entire class of
susceptibilities, and a gift connected with them--of no great richness
or value, but the best I had--was gone from me." He goes on to say
that he believes that he might have done something if he could have
made up his mind to convert the very substance of the commonplace that
surrounded him into matter of literature.

"I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing
out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the
inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention;
since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to
laughter and admiration by his marvellous gift as a
story-teller.... Or I might readily have found a more
serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this
daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to
fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating
a semblance of a world out of airy matter.... The wiser
effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination
through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a
bright transparency ... to seek resolutely the true and
indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and
wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was
now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that
was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only
because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book
than I shall ever write was there.... These perceptions came
too late.... I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor
tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor
of the Customs. That was all. But, nevertheless, it is
anything but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that
one's intellect is dwindling away, or exhaling, without your
consciousness, like ether out of phial; so that at every
glance you find a smaller and less volatile residuum."

As, however, it was with what was left of his intellect after three
years' evaporation, that Hawthorne wrote _The Scarlet Letter_, there
is little reason to complain of the injury he suffered in his
Surveyorship.

His publisher, Mr. Fields, in a volume entitled _Yesterdays with
Authors_, has related the circumstances in which Hawthorne's
masterpiece came into the world. "In the winter of 1849, after he had
been ejected from the Custom-house, I went down to Salem to see him
and inquire after his health, for we heard he had been suffering from
illness. He was then living in a modest wooden house.... I found him
alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling, and as the
day was cold he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk about his
future prospects, and he was,