[Illustration: OLD CUSTOMHOUSE, BOSTON,
Where Hawthorne worked.]
Love brought him out of his retreat, as it has accomplished many another miracle. When he became engaged his immediate thought was to find work, and one of his friends secured a position for him in the Boston customhouse, where he weighed coal until he was replaced by a party spoilsman. [Footnote: Hawthorne profited three times by the spoils system. When his Boston experience was repeated at Salem he took his revenge in the opening chapter of The Scarlet Letter, which ridicules those who received political jobs from the other party.] There were no civil-service rules in those days. Hoping to secure a home, he invested his savings in Brook Farm, worked there for a time with the reformers, detested them, lost his money and gained the experience which he used later in his Blithedale Romance. Then he married, and lived in poverty and great happiness for four years in the "Old Manse" at Concord. Another friend obtained for him political appointment as surveyor of the Salem customhouse; again he was replaced by a spoilsman, and again he complained bitterly. The loss proved a blessing, however, since it gave him leisure to write The Scarlet Letter, a novel which immediately placed Hawthorne in the front rank of American writers.
[Sidenote: FAREWELL GREATNESS]
He was now before an appreciative world, and in the flush of fine feeling that followed his triumph he wrote The House of the Seven Gables, A Wonder Book and The Snow Image. Literature was calling him most hopefully when, at the very prime of life, he turned his back on fortune. His friend Pierce had been nominated by the Democrats (1852), and he was asked to write the candidate's biography for campaign purposes. It was hardly a worthy task, but he accepted it and did it well. When Pierce was elected he "persuaded" Hawthorne to accept the office of consul at Liverpool. The emoluments, some seven thousand dollars a year, seemed enormous to one who had lived straitly, and in the four years of Pierce's administration our novelist saved a sum which, with the income from his books, placed him above the fear of want. Then he went for a long vacation to Italy, where he collected the material for his Marble Faun. But he wrote nothing more of consequence.
[Sidenote: THE UNFINISHED STORY]
The remainder of his life was passed in a pleasant kind of hermitage in Emerson's village of Concord. His habits of solitude and idleness ("cursed habits," he called them) were again upon him; though he began several romances—Dr. Grimshawe's Secret, Septimius Felton, The Ancestral Footstep and The Dolliver Romance—he never made an end of them. In his work he was prone to use some symbol of human ambition, and the symbol of his own later years might well have been the unfinished manuscript which lay upon the coffin when his body was laid under the pines in the old Concord burying ground (1864). His friend Longfellow has described the scene in his beautiful poem "Hawthorne."
SHORT STORIES AND SKETCHES. Many young people become familiar with Hawthorne as a teller of bedtime stories long before they meet him in the role of famous novelist. In his earlier days he wrote Grandfather's Chair (modeled on a similar work by Scott), dealing with Colonial legends, and broadened his field in Biographical Stories for Children. Other and better works belonging to the same juvenile class are A Wonder Book (1851) and Tanglewood Tales (1853), which are modern versions of the classic myths and stories that Greek mothers used to tell their children long ago.
[Sidenote: PICTURES OF THE PAST]
The best of Hawthorne's original stories are collected in Twice-Told Tales, Mosses from an Old Manse and The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales. As the bulk of this work is rather depressing we select a few typical tales, arranging them in three groups. In the first are certain sketches, as Hawthorne called them, which aim not to tell a story but to give an impression of the past. "The Old Manse" (in Mosses from an Old Manse) is an excellent introduction to this group. Others in which the author comes out from the gloom to give his humor a glimpse of pale sunshine are "A Rill from the Town Pump," "Main Street," "Little Annie's Ramble," "Sights from a Steeple" and, as suggestive of Hawthorne's solitary outings, "Footprints on the Seashore."
[Sidenote: ALLEGORIES]