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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dream Adio Books presents section three of the Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The custom House continued, such were some
of the people with whom I now found myself connected.
I took it in good part at the hands of
providence that I was thrown into a position so little
akin to my past habits, and set myself seriously to
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gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After
my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy
brethren of Brook Farm, after living for three years within
the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's, after those
wild free days on the Assabeth indulging fantastic speculations beside
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our fire of fallen boughs with Ellery Channing, after talking
with Threaux about pine trees and Indian relics in his
hermitage at Walden, after growing fastidious by sympathy with the
classic refinement of Hillard's culture, after becoming imbued with poetic
sentiment at Longfellow's Hearthstone, it was time at length that
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I should exercise other faculties of my nature and nourish
myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite.
Even the old inspector was desirable as a change of
diet to a man who had known Orcart. I looked
upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a
system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of
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the thorough organization, that with such associates, to remember, I
could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities,
and never murmur at the change. Literature, its exertions and objects,
were now of little moment in my regard. I cared
not at this period for books. They were apart from
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me nature, except it were human nature. The nature that
is developed in earth and sky was in one sense
hidden from me, and all the imaginative delight wherewith it
had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind, a gift,
a faculty, if it had not been departed, was suspended
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and inanimate within me. There would have been something sad,
unutterably dreary in all this. Had I not been conscious
that it lay at my own option to recall whatever
was valuable in the past, it might be true, indeed,
that this was a life which could not, with impunity,
be lived too long, else it might make me permanently
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other than I had been without transforming me into any
shape which it would be worth my while to take.
But I never considered it as other than a transitory life.
There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in
my ear, that within no long period, and whenever a
new change customs should be essential to my good, change
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would come. Meanwhile. There I was a surveyor of the revenue,
and so far as I have been able to understand,
as good a surveyor as need be, a man of thought, fancy,
and sensibility had he ten times the surveyor's proportion of
those qualities, may at any time be a man of affairs,
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if he will only choose to give himself the trouble.
My fellow officers, and the merchants and sea captains with
whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection,
viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me
in no other character. None of them, I presume, had
ever read a page of my indicting or would have
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cared to fig the more for me if they had
read them all. Nor would it have mended the matter
in the least had those same unprofitable pages been written
with a pen like those of Burns or of Chaucer,
each of whom was a custom house officer in his
day as well as I. It is a good lesson,
though it may often be a hard one for a
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man who has dreamed of literary fame and of making
for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries. By such
means to step aside out of the narrow circle in
which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly
devoid of significance beyond that circle is all that he
achieves and all he aims at. I know not that
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I especially needed the lesson, either in the way of
warning or rebuke, but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly.
Nor it gives me pleasure to reflect. Did the truth
as it came home to my perception ever cost me
a pang or require to be thrown off in a sigh?
In the way of literary talk, it is true the
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naval officer, an excellent fellow, who came into the office
with me and went out only a little later, would
often engage me in a discussion about one or other
of his favorite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The collector's junior
clerk too. A young gentleman who, it was whispered, occasionally
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covered a sheet of Uncle Sam's letter paper with what,
at the distance of a few yards, looked very much
like poetry, used now and then to speak to me
of books as matters with which I might possibly be conversant.
This was my all of lettered intercourse, and it was
quite sufficient for my necessities. No longer seeking or caring
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that my name should be blazoned abroad on title pages.
I smiled to think that it had now another kind
of vogue. The custom house marker imprinted it with a
stencil and black paint on pepper bags and baskets of
a natto, and cigar boxes and bales of all kinds
of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid
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the import and gone regularly through the office, borne on
such queer vehicle of fame. A knowledge of my existence,
so far as a name conveys, it was carried where
it had never been before, and I hope will never
go again. But the past was not dead. Once in
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a great while, the thoughts that had seemed so vital
and so active yet had been put to rest so
quietly revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions when
the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that
which brings it within the law of literary propriety to
offer the public the sketch which I am now writing.
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In the second story of the custom House, there is
a large room in which the brickwork and naked rafters
have never been covered with paneling and plaster. The edifice,
originally projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial
enterprise of the poor, and with an idea of subsequent
prosperity destined never to be realized, contains far more space
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than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall, therefore,
over the collector's apartments remains unfinished to this day, and
in spite of the aged cobwebs that for stoon its
dusky beams, appears still to await the labor of the
carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in
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a recess where a number of barrels piled one upon
another containing bundles of official documents, large quantities of similar
rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think
how many days and weeks and months and years of
toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were
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now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away
in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at
by human eyes. But then, what reams of other manuscy scripts,
filled not with the dullness of official formalities, but with
the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of
deep hearts, had gone equally to oblivion, and that moreover
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without serving a purpose in their day, as these heaped
up papers had, and saddest of all, without purchasing for
their writers the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the
custom house had gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen.
Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps as materials of local history, here,
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no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem might
be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants, Old King Derby,
Old Billy Gray, Old Simon Forrester, and many another magnet
in his day, whose powdered head, however, were scarcely in
the tomb. Before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle,
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the founders of the greater part of the families which
now compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced
from the petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic at
periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what
their children look upon as long established rank prior to
the Revolution. There is a dearth of records, the earlier
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documents and archives of the custom House having probably been
carried off to Halifax when all the King's officials accompanied
the British Army in its flight from Boston. It has
often been a matter of regret with me for going back,
perhaps to the days of the Protectorate. Those papers must
have contained many references to forgotten or remembered men and
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to antique customs, which would have affected me with the
same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian
arrowheads in the field near the Old Mans. But one
idle and rainy day it was my fortune to make
a discovery of some little interes, poking and burrowing into
the heaped up rubbish in the corner, unfolding one and
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another document, and reading the names of vessels that had
long ago founded at sea or rotted at the wharves,
and those of merchants never heard of now on change,
nor very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones. Glancing at
such matters with the saddened, weary, half reluctant interest which
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we bestow on the corpse of dead activity, and exerting
my fancy, sluggish with little use to raise up from
these dry bones and image of the old town's brighter aspect.
When India was a new region, and only Salem knew
the way thither, I chanced to lay my hand on
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a small package, carefully done up in a piece of
ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an
official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed
their stiff and formal birography on more substantial materials than
at present. There was something about it that quickened an
instinctive curiosity and made me undo the faded red tape
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that tied up the package, with the sense that treasure
would here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds
of the parchment cover, I found it to be a
commission under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in
favor of one Jonathan pw a surveyor of his Majesty's
Customs for the Port of Salem in the Province of Massachusetts.
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Bay I remembered to have read, probably in Felt's annals,
a notice of the decease of mister Surveyor Pew about
four score years ago, and likewise, in a newspaper of
recent times, an account of the digging up of his
remains in the little graveyard of Saint Peter's Church during
the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call
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to mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an
imperfect skeleton and some fragments of apparel, and a wig
of majestic frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once adorned,
was in very satisfactory preservation. But on examining the papers
which the parchment commissioned served to envelop, I found more
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traces of mister Pew's mental part and the internal operations
of his head, than the frizzled wig had contained of
the venerable skull itself. They were documents, in short, not official,
but of a private nature, or at least written in
his private capacity, and apparently with his own hand, I
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could account for their being included in the heap of
custom house lumber only by the fact that mister Pew's
death had happened suddenly, and that these papers, which he
probably kept in his official desk, had never come to
the knowledge of his heirs or were supposed to relate
to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of
the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of
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no public concern, was left behind and had remained ever
since unopened. The ancient surveyor, being little molested, I suppose
at that early day, with business pertaining to his office,
seems to have devoted to some of his many leisure
hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other inquisitions
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of a similar nature. These supplied material for petty activity
to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up
with rust. A portion of his facts, by the bye,
did me good service in the preparation of the article
entitled Main Street included in the present volume. The remainder
may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable hereafter, or
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not impossibly, may be worked up so far as they
go into a regular history of Salem. Should my veneration
for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious
a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of
any gentleman inclined and competent to take the unprofitable labour
off my hands. As a final disposition, I contemplated depositing
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them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that
most drew my attention to the mysterious package, was a
certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded.
There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however,
was greatly frayed and defaced, so that none or very
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little of the glitter was left. It had been wrought,
as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework,
and the stitch, as I am assured by ladies conversant
with such mysteries, gives evidence of a now forgotten art,
not to be discovered even by the process of picking
out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth for time
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where and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little
others than a rag. On careful examination assumed the shape
of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By
an accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three
inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended,
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there could be no doubt as an ornamental article of dress.
But how it was to be worn, or what rank,
honor and dignity in bypassed times were signified by It
was a riddle which so evanescent to the fashions of
the world in these particulars I saw little hope of solving,
and yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened themselves
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upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.
Certainly there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy
of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from
the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but
evading the analysis of my mind. When thus perplexed and cogitating,
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among other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have been
one of those decorations which the white men used to
contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians, I
happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to
me the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word.
It seemed to me then that I experienced a sensation
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not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat,
and as if the letter were not of red cloth,
but red hot iron, I shuddered, and involuntarily let it
fall upon the floor. In the absorbing contemplation of the
scarlet letter, I had hitherto neglected to examine a small
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roll of dingy paper around which it had been twisted.
This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find
recorded by the old surveyor's pen a reasonably complete explanation
of them the whole affair. There were several fool's cap
sheets containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation of
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one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been a rather
noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors. She had
flourished during the period between the early days of Massachusetts
and the close of the seventeenth century. Aged persons alive
in the time of mister Surveyor Pew and from whose
oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her
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in their youth as a very old, but not decrepit
woman of a stately and solemn aspect. It had been
her habit from an almost immemorial date to go about
the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing
whatever miscellaneous good she might, taking upon herself likewise to
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give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart,
by which means, as a person of such propensities, inevitably
much she gained from many people the reverence due to
an angel, but I should imagine was looked upon by
others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying further into
the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and
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sufferings of this singular woman, for most of which the
reader is referred to the story entitled the Scarlet Letter,
And it should be borne carefully in mind that the
main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by
the document of mister Surveyor Pew. The original papers, together
with the Scarlet Letter itself, a most curious relic, are
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still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever,
induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire
a sight of them. I must not be understood as
affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale and
imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the
characters who figure in it, I have in very confined
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myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's half A
dozen sheets of fool's cap. On the contrary, I have
allowed myself as to such points, nearly or altogether, as
much license as if the facts had been entirely of
my own invention. What I can tend for is the
authenticity of the outline. This incident recalled my mind in
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some degree to its old track. There seemed to be
here the groundwork of a tail. It impressed me as
if the ancient surveyor, in his garb of a hundred
years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig, which was
buried with him but did not perish in the grave,
had met me in the deserted chamber of the custom house.
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In his port was the dignity of one who had
borne his Majesty's commission, and who was therefore illuminated by
a ray of the splendor that shone so dazzlingly about
the throne. How unlike alas the hang dog look of
a Republican official, who, as the servant of the people,
feels himself less than the least and below the lowest
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of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely
seen but majestic figure had imparted to me the scarlet
symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his
own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred
consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him who
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might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor, to bring
his moldy and moth eaten lucubrations before the public. Do this,
said the ghost of mister Surveyor Pew, emphatically, nodding the
head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig. Do this,
and the prophet shall be all your own. You will
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shortly need it, for it is not in your days
as it was in mine, when a man's office was
a life lease and oftentimes an heirloom. But I charge
you in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to
your predecessor's memory the credit which will be rightfully due.
And I said to the ghost of mister Surveyor Pew,
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I will on hester Prynne's story. Therefore I bestowed much thought.
It was the subject of my meditations for many an hour,
while pacing to and fro across my room, or traversing
with one hundredfold repetition the long extent from the front
door of the custom house, to the side entrance, and
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back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the
old inspector, and the wayirs and gagers, whose slumbers were
disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and
returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to
say that the surveyor was walking the quarter deck. They
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probably fancied that my sole object, and indeed the sole
object for which a sane man could ever put him
into voluntary motion, was to get an appetite for dinner, And,
to say the truth, an appetite sharpened by the east
wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only
valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise, so little adapted
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as the atmosphere of a custom house, to the delicate
harvest of fancy and sensibility that had I remained there
through ten presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the
tale of the scarlet letter would ever have been brought
before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror.
It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the
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figures with which I did my best to people it.
The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and
rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at
my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of
passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the
rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face
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with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. What
have you to do with us? That expression seemed to say,
the little power you might have once possessed over the
tribe of unrealities is gone. You have bartered it for
a pittance of the public gold. Go then and earn
your wages. In short, the almost torpid creatures of my
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own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and a
half which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my
daily life, that this wretched numbness held possession of me.
It went with me on my sea shore walks and
rambles into the country whenever, which was seldom, and reluctantly
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I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of nature
which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought.
The moment that I stepped across the threshold of the
old man, the same torper, as regarded the capacity for
intellectual effort, accompanied me home and weighed upon me in
the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor
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did it quit me when late at night I sat
in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glimmering coal
fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes
which the next day might flow out on the brightening
page in many hued description. If the imaginative faculty refused
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to act at such an hour, it might well be
deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures
so distinctly, making every object so minutely visible, yet so
unlike a morning or noontide. Visibility is a medium the
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most suitable for a romance writer to get acquainted with
his elusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of
the well known apartment, the chairs, with each its separate individuality,
the center table sustaining a work basket, a volume or two,
and an extinguished lamp. The sofa, the bookcase, the picture
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on the wall. All these details so completely seen, are
so spiritualized by the unusual light that they seem to
lose their actual substance and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change
and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe, the doll seated
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in her little wicker carriage, the hobby horse. Whatever, in
a word, has been used or played with during the day,
is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness,
though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore,
or the floor of our familiar room has become a
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neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy land,
where the actual and the imaginary may meet and each
imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might
enter here without affrightening us. It would be too much
in keeping with a scene to excite surprise were we
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to look about us and discover a form beloved but gone,
hence now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic
moonshine with an aspect that would make us doubt whether
it had returned from Afar or had never once stirred
from our fireside. The somewhat dim coal fire has an
essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe.
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It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a
faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected
gleam upon the polish of the furniture. This warmer light
mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates,
as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness
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to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them
from snow images into men and women. Glancing at the
looking glass we behold deep within its haunted verge, the
smoldering glow of the half extinguished anthracide, the white moonbeams
on the floor, and repetition of all the gleam and
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shadow of the picture. With one remove further from the
actual and nearer to the imaginative, then at such an hour,
and with this scene before him, if a man sitting
all alone cannot dream strange things and make them look
like truth, he need never try to write romances. But
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for myself, during the whole of my custom house experience
moonlight and sunshine and the glow of firelight were just
alike in my regard, and neither of them was of
one whit more availed 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
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I had was gone from me. It is my belief, however,
that had I attempted a different order of composition, my
faculties would not have been found so pointless and inefficacious.
I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out
the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the inspectors
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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 marvelous gifts as a
story teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque force of
his style and the humorous coloring which nature taught him
how to throw over his descriptions, The result, I honestly believe,
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would have been something new in literature, 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 the semblance of a world
out of airy matter, when at every moment the impalpable
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beauty of my soap bubble was broken by the rude
contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have
been to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance
of to day, and thus to make it a bright transparency,
to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so heavily,
to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay
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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
seemed dull and commonplace only because I had not fathomed
its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever
write was there, leaf after leaf, presenting itself to me,
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just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only
because my brain wanted the insight and my hand the
cunning to transcribe it at some future day. It may
be I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs,
and write them down, and find the letters turned to
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gold upon the page. These perceptions had come too late.
At the instant, I was only conscious that what would
have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil.
There was no occasion to make much moan about this
state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer
of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a
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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 a file, so that
at every glance you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.
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Of the fact, there could be no doubt. And examining
myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference
to the effect of public office on the character not
very favorable to the mode of life in question. In
some other form, perhaps I may hereafter develop these effects.
Suffice it here to say that a custom house officer
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of long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or
respectable personage for many reasons, one of them the tenure
by which he holds his situation, and another the very
nature of his business, which, though I trust an honest one,
is of such a sort that he does not share
in the united effort of mankind. An effect which I
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believe to be observable more or less in every individual
who has occupied the position, is that while he leans
on the mighty arm of the republic, his own proper
strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned
to the weakness or force of his original nature, the
capability of self support. If he possesses an unusual share
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of native energy, or if the enervating magic of place
do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers
may be redeemable. The ejected officer, fortunate in the unkindly
shove that sends him forth betimes to struggle amid a
struggling world, may return to himself and become all that
he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually
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keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin,
and is then thrust out with all sinews unstrung to
totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may,
conscious of his own infirmity, that his tempered steel and
elasticity are lost, He forever afterwards looks wistfully about him
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in quest of support external to himself, his pervading and
continual hope, a hallucination which, in the face of all
discouragement and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives,
and I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera,
torments him for a brief space after death, is that, finally,
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and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances,
he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than
anything else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever
enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil
and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick
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himself up out of the mud, when in a little
while hence the strong arm of his uncle will raise
and support him. Why should he work for his living
here or go to the gold in California, when he
is so soon to be made happy at monthly intervals
with a little pile of glittering coin out of his
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uncle's pocket. It is sadly curious to observe how slight
a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow
with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold, meaning no disrespect
to the worthy old gentleman, has in this respect a
quality of enchantment like that of the devil's wages. Whoever
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touches it should look well to himself, or he may
find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if
not his soul. Yet many of its better attributes, its
sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self reliant,
and all that gives the emphasis to manly character. Here
(35:05):
was a fine prospect in the distance. Not that the
surveyor brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that
he could be so utterly undone, either by continuance in
office or e chectment. Yet my reflections were not the
most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless, continually
prying into my mind to discover which of its poor
(35:28):
properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already
accrued to the remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much
longer I could stay in the custom house, and yet
go forth a man to confess the truth. It was
my greatest apprehension, as it would never be a measure
of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself,
(35:50):
and it hardly being in the nature of a public
officer to resign. It was my chief trouble, therefore, that
I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the
surveyorship and become much such another animal as the old inspector.
Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life
that lay before me, finally be with me as it
(36:11):
was with this venerable friend, to make the dinner hour
the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest
of it as an old dog spends it asleep in
the sunshine or in the shade a dreary look forward.
This for a man who felt it to be the
best definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range
of his faculties and sensibilities. But all this while I
(36:36):
was giving myself very unnecessary alarm, Providence had meditated better
things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my surveyorship
to adopt the tone of p p was the election
of General Taylor to the presidency. It is essential, in
(36:56):
order to a complete estimate of the advantages of official life,
to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile administration.
His position is then one of the most singularly irksome
and in every contingency disagreeable that a wretched mortal can
possibly occupy, with seldom an alternative of good. On either hand,
(37:17):
though what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a
strange experience to a man of pride and sensibility to
know that his interests are within the control of individuals
who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since
one or the other must needs happen, he would rather
(37:38):
be injured than obliged. Strange too, for one who has
kept his calmness throughout the contest to observe the bloodthirstiness
that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to
be conscious that he is himself among its objects. There
are a few uglier traits of human nature than this
tendency which I now witnessed in men, no way less
(38:00):
than their neighbors, to grow cruel merely because they possessed
the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine as applied
to officeholders were a literal fact instead of one of
the most apt of metaphors. It is my sincere belief
that the active members of the victorious party were sufficiently
excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have
(38:23):
thanked Heaven for the opportunity. It appears to me, who
have been a calm and curious observer as well in
victory as defeat, that this fierce and bitter spirit of
malice and revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs of
my own party, as it now did that of the Whigs.
Democrats take the offices as a general rule because they
(38:45):
need them, and because the practice of many years has
made it to the law of political warfare, which, unless
a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice
to murmurat. But the long habit of victory has made
them generous. They know how to spare when they see occasion,
and when they strike. The axe may be sharp, indeed,
(39:07):
but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill will. Nor
is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which
they have just struck off in short, unpleasant, as was
my predicament. At best, I saw much reason to congratulate
myself that I was on the losing side rather than
the triumphant one. If heretofore I had been none of
(39:28):
the warmest of partisans. I began now, at the season
of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with
which party my predilections lay. Nor was it without something
like regret and shame that, according to a reasonable calculation
of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office
to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But
(39:52):
who can see an inch into futurity beyond his nose?
My own head was the first that fell. The moment
when a man's head drops off is seldom or never
I am inclined to think precisely the most agreeable of
his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes,
even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation
(40:16):
with it, if the sufferer will but make the best
rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.
In my particular case, the consolatory topics were close at hand,
and indeed had suggested themselves to my meditations a considerable
time before it was requisite to use them. In view
of my previous weariness of office and vague thoughts of resignation,
(40:40):
my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should
entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, although beyond his hopes,
meets with the good, hap to be murdered in the
custom house. As before in the old Man's I had
spent three years, a term long enough to rest a
weary brain, long enough to break of old intellectual habits
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and make room for new ones, long enough and too
long to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what
was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being,
and withholding myself from toil that would at least have
stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded
(41:22):
his unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill
pleased to be recognized by the Whigs as an enemy,
since his inactivity and political affairs, his tendency to roam
at will in that broad and quiet field where all
mankind may meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow
paths where brethren of the same household must diverge from
(41:45):
one another. Had sometimes made it questionable with his brother
Democrats whether he was a friend. Now after he had
won the crown of martyrdom, though with no longer a
head to wear it on the pine, might be looked
upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it
(42:06):
seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of
the party with which he had been content to stand
than to remain a forlorn survivor when so many worthier
men were falling, And at last, after subsisting for four
years on the mercy of a hostile administration, be compelled
then to define his position anew and claim the yet
(42:27):
more humiliating mercy of a friendly one. Meanwhile, the press
had taken up my affair and kept me for a
week or two, careering through the public prints in my
decapitated state like Irving's headless horsemen, ghastly and grim and
longing to be buried as a political dead man. Ought
(42:48):
so much for my figurative self, the real human being,
all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders,
had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was
for the bear, and making an investment in ink, paper
and steel pens, had opened his long disused writing desk,
and was again a literary man. Now it was that
(43:12):
the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, mister surveyor Pew came
into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little space was
requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought to work
upon the tale with an effect in any degree satisfactory.
Even yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in
(43:33):
the task, it wears to my eye a stern and
somber aspect, too much ungladdened by genial sunshine, too little
relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost
every scene of nature and real life, and undoubtedly should
soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating effect is perhaps
(43:55):
due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution and still
seething turmoil in which the story shaped itself. It is
no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the
writer's mind, for he was happier while straying through the
gloom of these sunless fantasies than at any time since
he had quitted the old man's. Some of the briefer
(44:17):
articles which contribute to make up the volume have likewise
been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and
honors of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from
annuals and magazines of such antique date that they have
gone round the circle and come back to novelty again,
keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine. The whole
(44:40):
may be considered as the posthumous papers of a decapitated surveyor,
and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close,
if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in
his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who
writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world,
my bless sing on my friends, my forgiveness to my enemies.
(45:03):
For I am in the realm of quiet. The life
of the custom house lies like a dream behind me.
The old inspector, who, by the bye I regret to say,
was overthrown and killed by a horse some time ago,
else he would certainly have lived forever. He and all
those other venerable personages who sat with him at the
(45:25):
receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view, white
headed and wrinkled images which my fancy used to sport with,
and has now flung aside forever. The merchants Pingree, Phillips, Shepherd, Upton, Kimball,
Bertram Hunt, these and many other names which had such
(45:47):
classic familiarity for my ear six months ago, these men
of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position
in the world. How little time has it required to
disconnect me from them all? Not merely an act but recollection.
It is with an effort that I recall the figures
and appellations of these few. Soon likewise, my old native
(46:12):
town will loom upon me through the haze of memory,
a mist brooding over and around it, as if it
were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown
village in cloud land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people,
its wooden houses and walk, its homely lanes, and the
unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to
(46:35):
be a reality of my life. I am a citizen
of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me,
for though it has been as dear an object as
any in my literary efforts to be of some importance
in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory.
In this abode and burial place of so many of
(46:55):
my forefathers, there has never been for me the genial
atmosphere which a literary man requires in order to ripen
the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better
amongst other faces, and these familiar ones, it need hardly
be said, will do just as well without me. It
(47:16):
may be, however, oh transporting and triumphant thought, that the
great grandchildren of the present race, may sometimes think kindly
of the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of
days to come, among the sites memorable in the town's history,
shall point out the locality of the town pump end
(47:39):
of Section three. Dream Audiobooks hopes you have enjoyed this program.
Dream Adio Books presents section three of the Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne. The custom House continued, such were some
of the people with whom I now found myself connected.
I took it in good part at the hands of
providence that I was thrown into a position so little
akin to my past habits, and set myself seriously to
(00:24):
gather from it whatever profit was to be had. After
my fellowship of toil and impracticable schemes with the dreamy
brethren of Brook Farm, after living for three years within
the subtle influence of an intellect like Emerson's, after those
wild free days on the Assabeth indulging fantastic speculations beside
(00:46):
our fire of fallen boughs with Ellery Channing, after talking
with Threaux about pine trees and Indian relics in his
hermitage at Walden, after growing fastidious by sympathy with the
classic refinement of Hillard's culture, after becoming imbued with poetic
sentiment at Longfellow's Hearthstone, it was time at length that
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I should exercise other faculties of my nature and nourish
myself with food for which I had hitherto had little appetite.
Even the old inspector was desirable as a change of
diet to a man who had known Orcart. I looked
upon it as an evidence, in some measure, of a
system naturally well balanced, and lacking no essential part of
(01:33):
the thorough organization, that with such associates, to remember, I
could mingle at once with men of altogether different qualities,
and never murmur at the change. Literature, its exertions and objects,
were now of little moment in my regard. I cared
not at this period for books. They were apart from
(01:55):
me nature, except it were human nature. The nature that
is developed in earth and sky was in one sense
hidden from me, and all the imaginative delight wherewith it
had been spiritualized, passed away out of my mind, a gift,
a faculty, if it had not been departed, was suspended
(02:18):
and inanimate within me. There would have been something sad,
unutterably dreary in all this. Had I not been conscious
that it lay at my own option to recall whatever
was valuable in the past, it might be true, indeed,
that this was a life which could not, with impunity,
be lived too long, else it might make me permanently
(02:41):
other than I had been without transforming me into any
shape which it would be worth my while to take.
But I never considered it as other than a transitory life.
There was always a prophetic instinct, a low whisper in
my ear, that within no long period, and whenever a
new change customs should be essential to my good, change
(03:03):
would come. Meanwhile. There I was a surveyor of the revenue,
and so far as I have been able to understand,
as good a surveyor as need be, a man of thought, fancy,
and sensibility had he ten times the surveyor's proportion of
those qualities, may at any time be a man of affairs,
(03:26):
if he will only choose to give himself the trouble.
My fellow officers, and the merchants and sea captains with
whom my official duties brought me into any manner of connection,
viewed me in no other light, and probably knew me
in no other character. None of them, I presume, had
ever read a page of my indicting or would have
(03:48):
cared to fig the more for me if they had
read them all. Nor would it have mended the matter
in the least had those same unprofitable pages been written
with a pen like those of Burns or of Chaucer,
each of whom was a custom house officer in his
day as well as I. It is a good lesson,
though it may often be a hard one for a
(04:08):
man who has dreamed of literary fame and of making
for himself a rank among the world's dignitaries. By such
means to step aside out of the narrow circle in
which his claims are recognized, and to find how utterly
devoid of significance beyond that circle is all that he
achieves and all he aims at. I know not that
(04:30):
I especially needed the lesson, either in the way of
warning or rebuke, but at any rate, I learned it thoroughly.
Nor it gives me pleasure to reflect. Did the truth
as it came home to my perception ever cost me
a pang or require to be thrown off in a sigh?
In the way of literary talk, it is true the
(04:52):
naval officer, an excellent fellow, who came into the office
with me and went out only a little later, would
often engage me in a discussion about one or other
of his favorite topics, Napoleon or Shakespeare. The collector's junior
clerk too. A young gentleman who, it was whispered, occasionally
(05:12):
covered a sheet of Uncle Sam's letter paper with what,
at the distance of a few yards, looked very much
like poetry, used now and then to speak to me
of books as matters with which I might possibly be conversant.
This was my all of lettered intercourse, and it was
quite sufficient for my necessities. No longer seeking or caring
(05:37):
that my name should be blazoned abroad on title pages.
I smiled to think that it had now another kind
of vogue. The custom house marker imprinted it with a
stencil and black paint on pepper bags and baskets of
a natto, and cigar boxes and bales of all kinds
of dutiable merchandise, in testimony that these commodities had paid
(05:59):
the import and gone regularly through the office, borne on
such queer vehicle of fame. A knowledge of my existence,
so far as a name conveys, it was carried where
it had never been before, and I hope will never
go again. But the past was not dead. Once in
(06:21):
a great while, the thoughts that had seemed so vital
and so active yet had been put to rest so
quietly revived again. One of the most remarkable occasions when
the habit of bygone days awoke in me, was that
which brings it within the law of literary propriety to
offer the public the sketch which I am now writing.
(06:44):
In the second story of the custom House, there is
a large room in which the brickwork and naked rafters
have never been covered with paneling and plaster. The edifice,
originally projected on a scale adapted to the old commercial
enterprise of the poor, and with an idea of subsequent
prosperity destined never to be realized, contains far more space
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than its occupants know what to do with. This airy hall, therefore,
over the collector's apartments remains unfinished to this day, and
in spite of the aged cobwebs that for stoon its
dusky beams, appears still to await the labor of the
carpenter and mason. At one end of the room, in
(07:27):
a recess where a number of barrels piled one upon
another containing bundles of official documents, large quantities of similar
rubbish lay lumbering the floor. It was sorrowful to think
how many days and weeks and months and years of
toil had been wasted on these musty papers, which were
(07:48):
now only an encumbrance on earth, and were hidden away
in this forgotten corner, never more to be glanced at
by human eyes. But then, what reams of other manuscy scripts,
filled not with the dullness of official formalities, but with
the thought of inventive brains and the rich effusion of
deep hearts, had gone equally to oblivion, and that moreover
(08:14):
without serving a purpose in their day, as these heaped
up papers had, and saddest of all, without purchasing for
their writers the comfortable livelihood which the clerks of the
custom house had gained by these worthless scratchings of the pen.
Yet not altogether worthless, perhaps as materials of local history, here,
(08:36):
no doubt, statistics of the former commerce of Salem might
be discovered, and memorials of her princely merchants, Old King Derby,
Old Billy Gray, Old Simon Forrester, and many another magnet
in his day, whose powdered head, however, were scarcely in
the tomb. Before his mountain pile of wealth began to dwindle,
(08:58):
the founders of the greater part of the families which
now compose the aristocracy of Salem might here be traced
from the petty and obscure beginnings of their traffic at
periods generally much posterior to the Revolution, upward to what
their children look upon as long established rank prior to
the Revolution. There is a dearth of records, the earlier
(09:21):
documents and archives of the custom House having probably been
carried off to Halifax when all the King's officials accompanied
the British Army in its flight from Boston. It has
often been a matter of regret with me for going back,
perhaps to the days of the Protectorate. Those papers must
have contained many references to forgotten or remembered men and
(09:43):
to antique customs, which would have affected me with the
same pleasure as when I used to pick up Indian
arrowheads in the field near the Old Mans. But one
idle and rainy day it was my fortune to make
a discovery of some little interes, poking and burrowing into
the heaped up rubbish in the corner, unfolding one and
(10:06):
another document, and reading the names of vessels that had
long ago founded at sea or rotted at the wharves,
and those of merchants never heard of now on change,
nor very readily decipherable on their mossy tombstones. Glancing at
such matters with the saddened, weary, half reluctant interest which
(10:26):
we bestow on the corpse of dead activity, and exerting
my fancy, sluggish with little use to raise up from
these dry bones and image of the old town's brighter aspect.
When India was a new region, and only Salem knew
the way thither, I chanced to lay my hand on
(10:46):
a small package, carefully done up in a piece of
ancient yellow parchment. This envelope had the air of an
official record of some period long past, when clerks engrossed
their stiff and formal birography on more substantial materials than
at present. There was something about it that quickened an
instinctive curiosity and made me undo the faded red tape
(11:10):
that tied up the package, with the sense that treasure
would here be brought to light. Unbending the rigid folds
of the parchment cover, I found it to be a
commission under the hand and seal of Governor Shirley, in
favor of one Jonathan pw a surveyor of his Majesty's
Customs for the Port of Salem in the Province of Massachusetts.
(11:32):
Bay I remembered to have read, probably in Felt's annals,
a notice of the decease of mister Surveyor Pew about
four score years ago, and likewise, in a newspaper of
recent times, an account of the digging up of his
remains in the little graveyard of Saint Peter's Church during
the renewal of that edifice. Nothing, if I rightly call
(11:56):
to mind, was left of my respected predecessor, save an
imperfect skeleton and some fragments of apparel, and a wig
of majestic frizzle, which, unlike the head that it once adorned,
was in very satisfactory preservation. But on examining the papers
which the parchment commissioned served to envelop, I found more
(12:18):
traces of mister Pew's mental part and the internal operations
of his head, than the frizzled wig had contained of
the venerable skull itself. They were documents, in short, not official,
but of a private nature, or at least written in
his private capacity, and apparently with his own hand, I
(12:39):
could account for their being included in the heap of
custom house lumber only by the fact that mister Pew's
death had happened suddenly, and that these papers, which he
probably kept in his official desk, had never come to
the knowledge of his heirs or were supposed to relate
to the business of the revenue. On the transfer of
the archives to Halifax, this package, proving to be of
(13:01):
no public concern, was left behind and had remained ever
since unopened. The ancient surveyor, being little molested, I suppose
at that early day, with business pertaining to his office,
seems to have devoted to some of his many leisure
hours to researches as a local antiquarian, and other inquisitions
(13:23):
of a similar nature. These supplied material for petty activity
to a mind that would otherwise have been eaten up
with rust. A portion of his facts, by the bye,
did me good service in the preparation of the article
entitled Main Street included in the present volume. The remainder
may perhaps be applied to purposes equally valuable hereafter, or
(13:47):
not impossibly, may be worked up so far as they
go into a regular history of Salem. Should my veneration
for the natal soil ever impel me to so pious
a task. Meanwhile, they shall be at the command of
any gentleman inclined and competent to take the unprofitable labour
off my hands. As a final disposition, I contemplated depositing
(14:10):
them with the Essex Historical Society. But the object that
most drew my attention to the mysterious package, was a
certain affair of fine red cloth, much worn and faded.
There were traces about it of gold embroidery, which, however,
was greatly frayed and defaced, so that none or very
(14:32):
little of the glitter was left. It had been wrought,
as was easy to perceive, with wonderful skill of needlework,
and the stitch, as I am assured by ladies conversant
with such mysteries, gives evidence of a now forgotten art,
not to be discovered even by the process of picking
out the threads. This rag of scarlet cloth for time
(14:56):
where and a sacrilegious moth had reduced it to little
others than a rag. On careful examination assumed the shape
of a letter. It was the capital letter A. By
an accurate measurement, each limb proved to be precisely three
inches and a quarter in length. It had been intended,
(15:17):
there could be no doubt as an ornamental article of dress.
But how it was to be worn, or what rank,
honor and dignity in bypassed times were signified by It
was a riddle which so evanescent to the fashions of
the world in these particulars I saw little hope of solving,
and yet it strangely interested me. My eyes fastened themselves
(15:41):
upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside.
Certainly there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy
of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from
the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but
evading the analysis of my mind. When thus perplexed and cogitating,
(16:05):
among other hypotheses, whether the letter might not have been
one of those decorations which the white men used to
contrive in order to take the eyes of Indians, I
happened to place it on my breast. It seemed to
me the reader may smile, but must not doubt my word.
It seemed to me then that I experienced a sensation
(16:26):
not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat,
and as if the letter were not of red cloth,
but red hot iron, I shuddered, and involuntarily let it
fall upon the floor. In the absorbing contemplation of the
scarlet letter, I had hitherto neglected to examine a small
(16:47):
roll of dingy paper around which it had been twisted.
This I now opened, and had the satisfaction to find
recorded by the old surveyor's pen a reasonably complete explanation
of them the whole affair. There were several fool's cap
sheets containing many particulars respecting the life and conversation of
(17:08):
one Hester Prynne, who appeared to have been a rather
noteworthy personage in the view of our ancestors. She had
flourished during the period between the early days of Massachusetts
and the close of the seventeenth century. Aged persons alive
in the time of mister Surveyor Pew and from whose
oral testimony he had made up his narrative, remembered her
(17:31):
in their youth as a very old, but not decrepit
woman of a stately and solemn aspect. It had been
her habit from an almost immemorial date to go about
the country as a kind of voluntary nurse, and doing
whatever miscellaneous good she might, taking upon herself likewise to
(17:51):
give advice in all matters, especially those of the heart,
by which means, as a person of such propensities, inevitably
much she gained from many people the reverence due to
an angel, but I should imagine was looked upon by
others as an intruder and a nuisance. Prying further into
the manuscript, I found the record of other doings and
(18:14):
sufferings of this singular woman, for most of which the
reader is referred to the story entitled the Scarlet Letter,
And it should be borne carefully in mind that the
main facts of that story are authorized and authenticated by
the document of mister Surveyor Pew. The original papers, together
with the Scarlet Letter itself, a most curious relic, are
(18:39):
still in my possession, and shall be freely exhibited to whomsoever,
induced by the great interest of the narrative, may desire
a sight of them. I must not be understood as
affirming that, in the dressing up of the tale and
imagining the motives and modes of passion that influenced the
characters who figure in it, I have in very confined
(19:00):
myself within the limits of the old Surveyor's half A
dozen sheets of fool's cap. On the contrary, I have
allowed myself as to such points, nearly or altogether, as
much license as if the facts had been entirely of
my own invention. What I can tend for is the
authenticity of the outline. This incident recalled my mind in
(19:23):
some degree to its old track. There seemed to be
here the groundwork of a tail. It impressed me as
if the ancient surveyor, in his garb of a hundred
years gone by, and wearing his immortal wig, which was
buried with him but did not perish in the grave,
had met me in the deserted chamber of the custom house.
(19:45):
In his port was the dignity of one who had
borne his Majesty's commission, and who was therefore illuminated by
a ray of the splendor that shone so dazzlingly about
the throne. How unlike alas the hang dog look of
a Republican official, who, as the servant of the people,
feels himself less than the least and below the lowest
(20:06):
of his masters. With his own ghostly hand, the obscurely
seen but majestic figure had imparted to me the scarlet
symbol and the little roll of explanatory manuscript. With his
own ghostly voice, he had exhorted me, on the sacred
consideration of my filial duty and reverence towards him who
(20:27):
might reasonably regard himself as my official ancestor, to bring
his moldy and moth eaten lucubrations before the public. Do this,
said the ghost of mister Surveyor Pew, emphatically, nodding the
head that looked so imposing within its memorable wig. Do this,
and the prophet shall be all your own. You will
(20:50):
shortly need it, for it is not in your days
as it was in mine, when a man's office was
a life lease and oftentimes an heirloom. But I charge
you in this matter of old Mistress Prynne, give to
your predecessor's memory the credit which will be rightfully due.
And I said to the ghost of mister Surveyor Pew,
(21:12):
I will on hester Prynne's story. Therefore I bestowed much thought.
It was the subject of my meditations for many an hour,
while pacing to and fro across my room, or traversing
with one hundredfold repetition the long extent from the front
door of the custom house, to the side entrance, and
(21:33):
back again. Great were the weariness and annoyance of the
old inspector, and the wayirs and gagers, whose slumbers were
disturbed by the unmercifully lengthened tramp of my passing and
returning footsteps. Remembering their own former habits, they used to
say that the surveyor was walking the quarter deck. They
(21:54):
probably fancied that my sole object, and indeed the sole
object for which a sane man could ever put him
into voluntary motion, was to get an appetite for dinner, And,
to say the truth, an appetite sharpened by the east
wind that generally blew along the passage, was the only
valuable result of so much indefatigable exercise, so little adapted
(22:17):
as the atmosphere of a custom house, to the delicate
harvest of fancy and sensibility that had I remained there
through ten presidencies yet to come, I doubt whether the
tale of the scarlet letter would ever have been brought
before the public eye. My imagination was a tarnished mirror.
It would not reflect, or only with miserable dimness, the
(22:41):
figures with which I did my best to people it.
The characters of the narrative would not be warmed and
rendered malleable by any heat that I could kindle at
my intellectual forge. They would take neither the glow of
passion nor the tenderness of sentiment, but retained all the
rigidity of dead corpses, and stared me in the face
(23:01):
with a fixed and ghastly grin of contemptuous defiance. What
have you to do with us? That expression seemed to say,
the little power you might have once possessed over the
tribe of unrealities is gone. You have bartered it for
a pittance of the public gold. Go then and earn
your wages. In short, the almost torpid creatures of my
(23:26):
own fancy twitted me with imbecility, and not without fair occasion.
It was not merely during the three hours and a
half which Uncle Sam claimed as his share of my
daily life, that this wretched numbness held possession of me.
It went with me on my sea shore walks and
rambles into the country whenever, which was seldom, and reluctantly
(23:49):
I bestirred myself to seek that invigorating charm of nature
which used to give me such freshness and activity of thought.
The moment that I stepped across the threshold of the
old man, the same torper, as regarded the capacity for
intellectual effort, accompanied me home and weighed upon me in
the chamber which I most absurdly termed my study. Nor
(24:13):
did it quit me when late at night I sat
in the deserted parlor, lighted only by the glimmering coal
fire and the moon, striving to picture forth imaginary scenes
which the next day might flow out on the brightening
page in many hued description. If the imaginative faculty refused
(24:33):
to act at such an hour, it might well be
deemed a hopeless case. Moonlight in a familiar room, falling
so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures
so distinctly, making every object so minutely visible, yet so
unlike a morning or noontide. Visibility is a medium the
(24:56):
most suitable for a romance writer to get acquainted with
his elusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of
the well known apartment, the chairs, with each its separate individuality,
the center table sustaining a work basket, a volume or two,
and an extinguished lamp. The sofa, the bookcase, the picture
(25:18):
on the wall. All these details so completely seen, are
so spiritualized by the unusual light that they seem to
lose their actual substance and become things of intellect. Nothing
is too small or too trifling to undergo this change
and acquire dignity thereby. A child's shoe, the doll seated
(25:42):
in her little wicker carriage, the hobby horse. Whatever, in
a word, has been used or played with during the day,
is now invested with a quality of strangeness and remoteness,
though still almost as vividly present as by daylight. Thus, therefore,
or the floor of our familiar room has become a
(26:02):
neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy land,
where the actual and the imaginary may meet and each
imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might
enter here without affrightening us. It would be too much
in keeping with a scene to excite surprise were we
(26:23):
to look about us and discover a form beloved but gone,
hence now sitting quietly in a streak of this magic
moonshine with an aspect that would make us doubt whether
it had returned from Afar or had never once stirred
from our fireside. The somewhat dim coal fire has an
essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe.
(26:47):
It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a
faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected
gleam upon the polish of the furniture. This warmer light
mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates,
as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness
(27:08):
to the forms which fancy summons up. It converts them
from snow images into men and women. Glancing at the
looking glass we behold deep within its haunted verge, the
smoldering glow of the half extinguished anthracide, the white moonbeams
on the floor, and repetition of all the gleam and
(27:30):
shadow of the picture. With one remove further from the
actual and nearer to the imaginative, then at such an hour,
and with this scene before him, if a man sitting
all alone cannot dream strange things and make them look
like truth, he need never try to write romances. But
(27:53):
for myself, during the whole of my custom house experience
moonlight and sunshine and the glow of firelight were just
alike in my regard, and neither of them was of
one whit more availed 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
(28:16):
I had was gone from me. It is my belief, however,
that had I attempted a different order of composition, my
faculties would not have been found so pointless and inefficacious.
I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out
the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the inspectors
(28:36):
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 marvelous gifts as a
story teller. Could I have preserved the picturesque force of
his style and the humorous coloring which nature taught him
how to throw over his descriptions, The result, I honestly believe,
(28:58):
would have been something new in literature, 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 the semblance of a world
out of airy matter, when at every moment the impalpable
(29:23):
beauty of my soap bubble was broken by the rude
contact of some actual circumstance. The wiser effort would have
been to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance
of to day, and thus to make it a bright transparency,
to spiritualize the burden that began to weigh so heavily,
to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay
(29:47):
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
seemed dull and commonplace only because I had not fathomed
its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever
write was there, leaf after leaf, presenting itself to me,
(30:11):
just as it was written out by the reality of
the flitting hour, and vanishing as fast as written, only
because my brain wanted the insight and my hand the
cunning to transcribe it at some future day. It may
be I shall remember a few scattered fragments and broken paragraphs,
and write them down, and find the letters turned to
(30:33):
gold upon the page. These perceptions had come too late.
At the instant, I was only conscious that what would
have been a pleasure once was now a hopeless toil.
There was no occasion to make much moan about this
state of affairs. I had ceased to be a writer
of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a
(30:55):
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 a file, so that
at every glance you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.
(31:19):
Of the fact, there could be no doubt. And examining
myself and others, I was led to conclusions in reference
to the effect of public office on the character not
very favorable to the mode of life in question. In
some other form, perhaps I may hereafter develop these effects.
Suffice it here to say that a custom house officer
(31:42):
of long continuance can hardly be a very praiseworthy or
respectable personage for many reasons, one of them the tenure
by which he holds his situation, and another the very
nature of his business, which, though I trust an honest one,
is of such a sort that he does not share
in the united effort of mankind. An effect which I
(32:06):
believe to be observable more or less in every individual
who has occupied the position, is that while he leans
on the mighty arm of the republic, his own proper
strength departs from him. He loses, in an extent proportioned
to the weakness or force of his original nature, the
capability of self support. If he possesses an unusual share
(32:29):
of native energy, or if the enervating magic of place
do not operate too long upon him, his forfeited powers
may be redeemable. The ejected officer, fortunate in the unkindly
shove that sends him forth betimes to struggle amid a
struggling world, may return to himself and become all that
he has ever been. But this seldom happens. He usually
(32:55):
keeps his ground just long enough for his own ruin,
and is then thrust out with all sinews unstrung to
totter along the difficult footpath of life as he best may,
conscious of his own infirmity, that his tempered steel and
elasticity are lost, He forever afterwards looks wistfully about him
(33:16):
in quest of support external to himself, his pervading and
continual hope, a hallucination which, in the face of all
discouragement and making light of impossibilities, haunts him while he lives,
and I fancy, like the convulsive throes of the cholera,
torments him for a brief space after death, is that, finally,
(33:40):
and in no long time, by some happy coincidence of circumstances,
he shall be restored to office. This faith, more than
anything else, steals the pith and availability out of whatever
enterprise he may dream of undertaking. Why should he toil
and moil, and be at so much trouble to pick
(34:01):
himself up out of the mud, when in a little
while hence the strong arm of his uncle will raise
and support him. Why should he work for his living
here or go to the gold in California, when he
is so soon to be made happy at monthly intervals
with a little pile of glittering coin out of his
(34:21):
uncle's pocket. It is sadly curious to observe how slight
a taste of office suffices to infect a poor fellow
with this singular disease. Uncle Sam's gold, meaning no disrespect
to the worthy old gentleman, has in this respect a
quality of enchantment like that of the devil's wages. Whoever
(34:43):
touches it should look well to himself, or he may
find the bargain to go hard against him, involving, if
not his soul. Yet many of its better attributes, its
sturdy force, its courage and constancy, its truth, its self reliant,
and all that gives the emphasis to manly character. Here
(35:05):
was a fine prospect in the distance. Not that the
surveyor brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that
he could be so utterly undone, either by continuance in
office or e chectment. Yet my reflections were not the
most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless, continually
prying into my mind to discover which of its poor
(35:28):
properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already
accrued to the remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much
longer I could stay in the custom house, and yet
go forth a man to confess the truth. It was
my greatest apprehension, as it would never be a measure
of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself,
(35:50):
and it hardly being in the nature of a public
officer to resign. It was my chief trouble, therefore, that
I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the
surveyorship and become much such another animal as the old inspector.
Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life
that lay before me, finally be with me as it
(36:11):
was with this venerable friend, to make the dinner hour
the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest
of it as an old dog spends it asleep in
the sunshine or in the shade a dreary look forward.
This for a man who felt it to be the
best definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range
of his faculties and sensibilities. But all this while I
(36:36):
was giving myself very unnecessary alarm, Providence had meditated better
things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself.
A remarkable event of the third year of my surveyorship
to adopt the tone of p p was the election
of General Taylor to the presidency. It is essential, in
(36:56):
order to a complete estimate of the advantages of official life,
to view the incumbent at the incoming of a hostile administration.
His position is then one of the most singularly irksome
and in every contingency disagreeable that a wretched mortal can
possibly occupy, with seldom an alternative of good. On either hand,
(37:17):
though what presents itself to him as the worst event
may very probably be the best. But it is a
strange experience to a man of pride and sensibility to
know that his interests are within the control of individuals
who neither love nor understand him, and by whom, since
one or the other must needs happen, he would rather
(37:38):
be injured than obliged. Strange too, for one who has
kept his calmness throughout the contest to observe the bloodthirstiness
that is developed in the hour of triumph, and to
be conscious that he is himself among its objects. There
are a few uglier traits of human nature than this
tendency which I now witnessed in men, no way less
(38:00):
than their neighbors, to grow cruel merely because they possessed
the power of inflicting harm. If the guillotine as applied
to officeholders were a literal fact instead of one of
the most apt of metaphors. It is my sincere belief
that the active members of the victorious party were sufficiently
excited to have chopped off all our heads, and have
(38:23):
thanked Heaven for the opportunity. It appears to me, who
have been a calm and curious observer as well in
victory as defeat, that this fierce and bitter spirit of
malice and revenge has never distinguished the many triumphs of
my own party, as it now did that of the Whigs.
Democrats take the offices as a general rule because they
(38:45):
need them, and because the practice of many years has
made it to the law of political warfare, which, unless
a different system be proclaimed, it was weakness and cowardice
to murmurat. But the long habit of victory has made
them generous. They know how to spare when they see occasion,
and when they strike. The axe may be sharp, indeed,
(39:07):
but its edge is seldom poisoned with ill will. Nor
is it their custom ignominiously to kick the head which
they have just struck off in short, unpleasant, as was
my predicament. At best, I saw much reason to congratulate
myself that I was on the losing side rather than
the triumphant one. If heretofore I had been none of
(39:28):
the warmest of partisans. I began now, at the season
of peril and adversity, to be pretty acutely sensible with
which party my predilections lay. Nor was it without something
like regret and shame that, according to a reasonable calculation
of chances, I saw my own prospect of retaining office
to be better than those of my democratic brethren. But
(39:52):
who can see an inch into futurity beyond his nose?
My own head was the first that fell. The moment
when a man's head drops off is seldom or never
I am inclined to think precisely the most agreeable of
his life. Nevertheless, like the greater part of our misfortunes,
even so serious a contingency brings its remedy and consolation
(40:16):
with it, if the sufferer will but make the best
rather than the worst, of the accident which has befallen him.
In my particular case, the consolatory topics were close at hand,
and indeed had suggested themselves to my meditations a considerable
time before it was requisite to use them. In view
of my previous weariness of office and vague thoughts of resignation,
(40:40):
my fortune somewhat resembled that of a person who should
entertain an idea of committing suicide, and, although beyond his hopes,
meets with the good, hap to be murdered in the
custom house. As before in the old Man's I had
spent three years, a term long enough to rest a
weary brain, long enough to break of old intellectual habits
(41:01):
and make room for new ones, long enough and too
long to have lived in an unnatural state, doing what
was really of no advantage nor delight to any human being,
and withholding myself from toil that would at least have
stilled an unquiet impulse in me. Then, moreover, as regarded
(41:22):
his unceremonious ejectment, the late Surveyor was not altogether ill
pleased to be recognized by the Whigs as an enemy,
since his inactivity and political affairs, his tendency to roam
at will in that broad and quiet field where all
mankind may meet, rather than confine himself to those narrow
paths where brethren of the same household must diverge from
(41:45):
one another. Had sometimes made it questionable with his brother
Democrats whether he was a friend. Now after he had
won the crown of martyrdom, though with no longer a
head to wear it on the pine, might be looked
upon as settled. Finally, little heroic as he was, it
(42:06):
seemed more decorous to be overthrown in the downfall of
the party with which he had been content to stand
than to remain a forlorn survivor when so many worthier
men were falling, And at last, after subsisting for four
years on the mercy of a hostile administration, be compelled
then to define his position anew and claim the yet
(42:27):
more humiliating mercy of a friendly one. Meanwhile, the press
had taken up my affair and kept me for a
week or two, careering through the public prints in my
decapitated state like Irving's headless horsemen, ghastly and grim and
longing to be buried as a political dead man. Ought
(42:48):
so much for my figurative self, the real human being,
all this time, with his head safely on his shoulders,
had brought himself to the comfortable conclusion that everything was
for the bear, and making an investment in ink, paper
and steel pens, had opened his long disused writing desk,
and was again a literary man. Now it was that
(43:12):
the lucubrations of my ancient predecessor, mister surveyor Pew came
into play. Rusty through long idleness, some little space was
requisite before my intellectual machinery could be brought to work
upon the tale with an effect in any degree satisfactory.
Even yet, though my thoughts were ultimately much absorbed in
(43:33):
the task, it wears to my eye a stern and
somber aspect, too much ungladdened by genial sunshine, too little
relieved by the tender and familiar influences which soften almost
every scene of nature and real life, and undoubtedly should
soften every picture of them. This uncaptivating effect is perhaps
(43:55):
due to the period of hardly accomplished revolution and still
seething turmoil in which the story shaped itself. It is
no indication, however, of a lack of cheerfulness in the
writer's mind, for he was happier while straying through the
gloom of these sunless fantasies than at any time since
he had quitted the old man's. Some of the briefer
(44:17):
articles which contribute to make up the volume have likewise
been written since my involuntary withdrawal from the toils and
honors of public life, and the remainder are gleaned from
annuals and magazines of such antique date that they have
gone round the circle and come back to novelty again,
keeping up the metaphor of the political guillotine. The whole
(44:40):
may be considered as the posthumous papers of a decapitated surveyor,
and the sketch which I am now bringing to a close,
if too autobiographical for a modest person to publish in
his lifetime, will readily be excused in a gentleman who
writes from beyond the grave. Peace be with all the world,
my bless sing on my friends, my forgiveness to my enemies.
(45:03):
For I am in the realm of quiet. The life
of the custom house lies like a dream behind me.
The old inspector, who, by the bye I regret to say,
was overthrown and killed by a horse some time ago,
else he would certainly have lived forever. He and all
those other venerable personages who sat with him at the
(45:25):
receipt of custom, are but shadows in my view, white
headed and wrinkled images which my fancy used to sport with,
and has now flung aside forever. The merchants Pingree, Phillips, Shepherd, Upton, Kimball,
Bertram Hunt, these and many other names which had such
(45:47):
classic familiarity for my ear six months ago, these men
of traffic, who seemed to occupy so important a position
in the world. How little time has it required to
disconnect me from them all? Not merely an act but recollection.
It is with an effort that I recall the figures
and appellations of these few. Soon likewise, my old native
(46:12):
town will loom upon me through the haze of memory,
a mist brooding over and around it, as if it
were no portion of the real earth, but an overgrown
village in cloud land, with only imaginary inhabitants to people,
its wooden houses and walk, its homely lanes, and the
unpicturesque prolixity of its main street. Henceforth it ceases to
(46:35):
be a reality of my life. I am a citizen
of somewhere else. My good townspeople will not much regret me,
for though it has been as dear an object as
any in my literary efforts to be of some importance
in their eyes, and to win myself a pleasant memory.
In this abode and burial place of so many of
(46:55):
my forefathers, there has never been for me the genial
atmosphere which a literary man requires in order to ripen
the best harvest of his mind. I shall do better
amongst other faces, and these familiar ones, it need hardly
be said, will do just as well without me. It
(47:16):
may be, however, oh transporting and triumphant thought, that the
great grandchildren of the present race, may sometimes think kindly
of the scribbler of bygone days, when the antiquary of
days to come, among the sites memorable in the town's history,
shall point out the locality of the town pump end
(47:39):
of Section three. Dream Audiobooks hopes you have enjoyed this program.
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