HAWTHORNE. 656 HAWTHORNE. ing Knowledge, on which he worked also as editor ( 1830) , at a salary of $500. For the same publisher he compiled a Universal History, by which he earned little. Meantime his genius had been discovered by the London Atlicnaum, which reprinted three of his most characteristic pieces, and with this encouragement Goodrich brought out in 1837 the first collection of Tioice-Told Tales. These were generously reviewed by Long- fellow, who praised the author's genius and the beauty of his style ; but they were received by the public with languid ap])reciation. The slight returns from literature prompted Hawthorne to accept from the Collector of the Port of Boston, George Bancroft, the historian, a post as weigher in the custom-house there, and in this office he measured coal, salt, and the like, at a salary of $1200. Salem was strongly Feder- alist in politics, and Hawthorne, an hereditary Democrat, owed this position less to his own abilities than to partisan policy. He performed his irksome work for two years (1839-41), but was dismissed on the advent of the Whigs to power. Vith a mind somewhat widened by this experience, he returned to Salem and to litera- ture, and wrote a series of sketches of New Eng- land history for children, which he published as Grandfather's Chair (1841). In April of that year he was drawn to Brook Farm (q.v.). He invested $1000 in the enterprise, his savings from the custom-house, and charmed his asso- ciates by his modest manliness; but, like the Miles Coverdale of his Blithedale Romance, a hardly disguised picture of this experiment, he was rather a looker-on than a participant. The genius of Brook Farm was discipline through society. Hawthorne's taste was for solitude, and after a year's patient experiment he left it, married Miss Peabody, of Salem, and made a home for him- self at Concord, in the house that he has made memorable by his Mosses from an Old ilanse. Here he wrote a second part of Grandfather's Chair (1842). and in 1842 published a second collection of Tifice-Told Tales. In that year he also edited the African Journal of his old classmate at Bowdoin, Horatio Bridge, and in the next year published two volumes of Jlosses from an Old Manse, the fruit of his scholarly leisure. Many of these sketches, however, had first appeared in the Democratic Re^^ieic, from whose irregular payments he derived most of his income, till it failed, much in his debt (1845), These stories include such masterpieces in miniature as: The Celestial Railroad; The Procession of Life; Roger Malvin's Burial; Rappaccini's Daughter; The Birthmark ; Young Goodman Broicn : The Artist of the Beautiful, which, with some of the Ticdce- Told Tales, notably the four Legends of the Prov- ince House, first represent his mature genius. But they did not afford him a living, and after four years at Concord he returned to the civil service, and accepted from the new Democratic Administration the post of surveyor of the cus- tom-house at Salem. There his powers ripened for three years, and reached their fullest expres- sion in The Scarlet Letter (1850), the first draught of which he wrote before leaving his post. He has told the story of this period in the introduction to the novel with an irony not a little resented by his fellow-citizens, to whom, indeed, he felt he owed no debt, having been, he said, "deliberately lied down" by them till he was at last removed from office. The Scarlet Letter, a.s written at Salem, seemed to him so sombre that he submitted to his friend and publisher, James T. Fields, in Boston, a pro- posal to print with it some sketches in lighter vein, that may now be read in The Snow Image (1852), but Fields was so deeply impressed by the work that he persuaded Hawthorne to revise and extend it, though he was skeptical enough to have the type distributed without stereotyping. The first edition of five thousand copies was sold in two weeks. The book was immediately reset, at once reprinted in England, and on both sides of the Atlantic was received with the greatest enthusiasm. It was Hawthorne's first sustained effort, and his greatest. From this time till his death he devoted himself to writing, and found a ready market for his work. He moved in the summer of 18.50 to Lenox, Mass., still eagerly seeking seclusion, save for the genial companion- ship of Herman Melville, who lived at Pittsfield. Here he wrote The House of the Seven Gables (1851), a story of subtle power. The same year brought forth the juvenile Wonder Book. In 1851 he left Lenox for West Newton, where he wrote The Blithedale Romance ( 1852), The Snow Image, and other Twice-Told Tales (1852) ; and in the spring of the next year went back to his old favorite Concord, where, with Alcott for his next-door neighbor, he wrote, by one of litera- ture's ironies, a campaign Life of Franklin Pierce (1852), and also Tanglewood Talcs (1853). He had declared that he would take no office in case of Pierce's election, but his friends made him think better of it, and he accepted from his old college mate the consulate at Liverpool. The next seven years Hawthorne spent in Eu- ro[)e — five, at the consulate, with little journeys to the English lakes and Scotland, two in France and Italy. A record of the English years re- mains in English Xote-Books and Our Old Home. That of the Continent may be found in French and Italian Note-Books. The monumental work of this period is The Marble Faun (1860), published also in England under the title Transformation, a romance long popular, but which scarcely holds its own with the critics, WTien he returned to America on the eve of the Civil War, he found himself somewhat remote, both by nature and by political sympathy, from the intense passions of the period. He was. as he had ever been in pub- lie affairs, rather a looker-on than an actor. Very characteristic of his attitude is a little paper, "Chiefly About War Matters." printed in the Atlantic Monthly (1862), with some editorial excision and foot-notes, which, though ascribed to the editor, are Hawthorne's own. Characteristic, too, of his aloofness from the passion of the time was his dedication to the then unpopular Presi- dent Pierce of Our Old Home. This book indeed well expressed the feeling of New England for the Old, That the English did not like the book rather enhanced the interest in it in Ameri- ca. This was Hawthorne's last book. The Dol- liver Romance, begim in the .itlantic Monthly, was incomplete at his death, as was Dr. Grim- shawe's Secret, first printed in 1882. Septimius Felton also was rescued from loose sheets and printed, not as he would have had it, in 1871. These, and even more inchoate fragments, add nothing to his fame or achievements. He did little after the spring of 1864. His health failed rapidly, and he received a .shock, from which he never recovered, by the sudden death of his
