Hawthorne | Page 6

mingled tenderness and rancour, are visible in the
Introduction to The Scarlet Letter.
"The old town of Salem," he writes,--"my native place, though I have dwelt much away
from it, both in boyhood and in maturer years--possesses, or did possess, a hold on my
affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence
here. Indeed, so far as the physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface,
covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural
beauty; its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame; its long
and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with
Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other--such
being the features of my native town it would be quite as reasonable to form a
sentimental attachment to a disarranged chequer-board."
But he goes on to say that he has never divested himself of the sense of intensely
belonging to it--that the spell of the continuity of his life with that of his predecessors has
never been broken. "It is no matter that the place is joyless for him; that he is weary of
the old wooden houses, the mud and the dust, the dead level of site and sentiment, the
chill east wind, and the chilliest of social atmospheres;--all these and whatever faults
besides he may see or imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as
powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise." There is a very American
quality in this perpetual consciousness of a spell on Hawthorne's part; it is only in a
country where newness and change and brevity of tenure are the common substance of

life, that the fact of one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a
single spot would become an element of one's morality. It is only an imaginative
American that would feel urged to keep reverting to this circumstance, to keep analysing
and cunningly considering it.
The Salem of to-day has, as New England towns go, a physiognomy of its own, and in
spite of Hawthorne's analogy of the disarranged draught-board, it is a decidedly agreeable
one. The spreading elms in its streets, the proportion of large, square, honourable-looking
houses, suggesting an easy, copious material life, the little gardens, the grassy waysides,
the open windows, the air of space and salubrity and decency, and above all the
intimation of larger antecedents--these things compose a picture which has little of the
element that painters call depth of tone, but which is not without something that they
would admit to be style. To English eyes the oldest and most honourable of the smaller
American towns must seem in a manner primitive and rustic; the shabby, straggling,
village-quality appears marked in them, and their social tone is not unnaturally inferred to
bear the village stamp. Village-like they are, and it would be no gross incivility to
describe them as large, respectable, prosperous, democratic villages. But even a village,
in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are no overshadowing squires, where the
"county" has no social existence, where the villagers are conscious of no superincumbent
strata of gentility, piled upwards into vague regions of privilege--even a village is not an
institution to accept of more or less graceful patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself,
and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port deserted and
decayed. It belongs to that rather melancholy group of old coast-towns, scattered along
the great sea-face of New England, and of which the list is completed by the names of
Portsmouth, Plymouth, New Bedford, Newburyport, Newport--superannuated centres of
the traffic with foreign lands, which have seen their trade carried away from them by the
greater cities. As Hawthorne says, their ventures have gone "to swell, needlessly and
imperceptibly, the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston." Salem, at the
beginning of the present century, played a great part in the Eastern trade; it was the
residence of enterprising shipowners who despatched their vessels to Indian and Chinese
seas. It was a place of large fortunes, many of which have remained, though the activity
that produced them has passed away. These successful traders constituted what
Hawthorne calls "the aristocratic class." He alludes in one of his slighter sketches (The
Sister Years) to the sway of this class and the "moral influence of wealth" having been
more marked in Salem than in any other New England town. The sway, we may believe,
was on the whole gently exercised, and the moral influence of wealth was not exerted in
the cause of immorality. Hawthorne was probably but imperfectly conscious of an