Notes on the Scarlet Letter

THE trouble with those who deny Shakespeare’s authorship of the plays usually ascribed to him is that they cannot believe in a miracle. How can this great thing come out of Warwickshire, — a hundred miles away from London, — this son of a wool-comber, this truant deer-stealer who never saw Oxford, yet writing plays such as the world had not heard before nor has heard since? It was a miracle indeed, but of the kind that is all the while happening in a world that is greatly in need of what a miracle only can yield. For genius is a miracle; that is, it is inexplicable. Balzac, in the preface of Le Père Goriot, says that “ chance is the great romance-maker of the ages.” It might be said that it also makes the romancers, for they appear as by chance, — unheralded and without apparent cause. Here is this boy Hawthorne, born in Salem a century ago, son of generations of shipmasters, not a touch of genius in ancestors or kindred, in a community absorbed in commercialism and at that time singularly free from any flame at which genius could kindle its torch. At the age of fourteen he goes to Maine to reside with an uncle for a time ; returns to Salem and prepares for Bowdoin College, where he has Longfellow as a classmate and Franklin Pierce as a friend. He proves to be an indifferent scholar, and shows no signs of genius, unless it be an undue love of solitude and a brooding disposition that might argue either dullness or unusual intelligence. Genius has no clear signs. Nothing heralds it, and it has no true authentication until it does some work that stamps it as its own.

The authentication came late with Hawthorne. Three years after graduation in 1825, he published anonymously a short novel — Fanshawe — that had no sale, and was so slightly regarded by himself that he destroyed most of the first edition, with the result that not more than five copies are in existence. It had, however, the touch that is the peculiar charm of his later writings. For the next ten or twelve years he produced almost nothing, at least nothing commensurate with the long period of time and apparent leisure. Yet, he regarded literature as his vocation, and was striving to live by his pen. He wrote a group of seven short stories which he burned, with how much wealth of genius in them we do not know. That they were rejected by seventeen publishers is no sign that they lacked this subtle quality. Nothing is so elusive and so shy of recognition as genius, for the simple reason that there is no rule by which it can be measured. The publishers have a little mathematical machine by which they can, in a moment, tell you how many printed pages will be required for your bulky pile of manuscript; but they have not yet found a machine that will measure or even detect the presence of that imponderable and unmeasurable thing called genius. The only approach to such a machine is some rare human being who happens (and here the miracle again comes in) to have a spark of it — latent or active — in his own composition. Doubtless these seven tales were full of the qualities that give priceless value to the few stories that are left. Nor is it strange that he did not himself detect the divine spark that glowed within them. Genius is like the eye which sees all things except itself. Hawthorne had a way of burning his productions whenever the hour of weakness or self-distrust — such as often visits men of genius — came to him. Mr. James T. Fields told the writer — in the sixties — that Hawthorne, having got well into the Scarlet Letter, invited him to Salem to hear it read. Hawthorne was disposed to destroy it, and that might have been its fate had not Mr. Fields, who, better than any man of his day, knew a book when he saw one, interposed with a publisher’s authority, and so saved one which Mr. Woodberry — Hawthorne’s latest biographer — says is “ a great and unique romance, standing apart by itself in fiction ; there is nothing else quite like it.”

There is but little to tell of him biographically ; and far less concerning his inner life; or, this would be the case were it not that a writer who deals chiefly with the human soul, and spreads it out in scores of characters, cannot fail also to reveal himself. He was shy to the last degree, and he early formed what he called “ a cursed habit of solitude ; ” but the accuracy with which he uncovers the hidden working of the hearts of others becomes a mirror in which his own heart is pictured. At first, one is inclined to think him a cold, impassive writer, who holds the mirror up to Nature, — himself simply steadying it while the artist looks through, and declares what he sees. But a full reading somewhat alters one’s opinion of him. It does not follow that the recluse is indifferent to humanity; he may be simply less gregarious, or he has less need of others, or finds his best development in solitude, or is called to some task that requires a steady gaze at certain types of life without disturbing them with spoken words. It is easy to say that had Hawthorne’s contact with the world been closer, and had he been reared in a richer and more complex society, his writings would have been less sombre and more varied in their themes. Mr. Henry James — his severest critic while a great admirer — grants that the simplicity of his life was in his favor; “ it helped him to appear complete and homogeneous.” But when Mr. James seems to limit him by declaring that he is “intensely and vividly local,” one pauses to ask if local color hinders universality of treatment. He had the independence and originality of his own genius, but he found his subjects in New England. His chief theme was the play of conscience under a sense of sin and guilt. Now, nothing is truer than that this theme had wide illustration in New England, and especially in its theology, where it was an organic factor. The reality of sin; its destructive effect on character ; its doomlike aspect; the horrible certainty of its result; the impossibility of escape from it except by a special and personal decree of God ; the haunting misery of it, fed by uncertainty as to escape ; the tragedy that not seldom sprang out of it in every community, — all this was familiar to Hawthorne ; but it is a singular fact that, while treating the generic truth, he never seriously touches the prevalent theological aspects of it. It is not the sin, nor the guilt, nor the reprobation of the New England theology exclusively that yields him his themes. Had he established a closer relation to it in his plots, he might almost have been claimed as an adherent or a critic of it. But he cannot be located in that region of thought. Neither sin, nor guilt, nor remorse, belongs exclusively to the Puritan, nor to any theology, though wrought into all. They belong to humanity as parts of its universal problem, and it is as such that Hawthorne treated them. Thus he escaped the charge of provincialism. It is no derogation to admit that he was, in one sense, provincial, — like Burns and Scott, — but his genius was adequate to his standing in the broad field of universal humanity in company with the great masters of it.

Why did Hawthorne choose this one theme, — sin and its consequences, — hardly putting pen to paper except to set down something bearing on it ? He was not what is usually termed a religious man ; that note was not fully accentuated in him; though what depths of spiritual feeling were hidden in that never-revealed heart let no man attempt to measure. Nor did he take an interest in the theological debates that clustered about sin. Orthodox and Unitarian were one or nothing with him; their contentions will pass, — his remain as new and as old as humanity. He took no interest in reforms, and held himself aloof from every practical question of social life and activity except when forced to it by the necessity of a livelihood, — for until he was forty-six chill penury was his lot. Why, then, did he choose sin as his theme ? For the same reason that the great masters in literature always gravitate to it. The Hebrews put it into the first pages of their sacred books. Job chose it, and set a pace often followed but not yet overtaken. The Greeks built their drama upon it. Shakespeare and Goethe could not justify their genius except as over and over again they dealt with it. Dante put it under heaven and hell and all between. Milton could find no theme adequate to his genius but “ man’s first disobedience.” Shall we say, then, that a great genius makes sin his theme because it suits his purpose as an artist ? Let us not so belie him. He takes it because it is the greatest theme, and also because it falls in either with his convictions as in the case of Milton, or with his temperament as in the case of Hawthorne. And why is it great ? Because it is a violation of the order of the world, and is the defeat of humanity. It throws human nature wide open to our gaze ; we look on the ruin and see man’s greatness ; on his misery, and so uncover pity, which becomes a redeeming force. Thus it opens the whole wide play of human life in its highest and deepest relations. Nothing so interests men as their sins and defeats. Tragedy is born of them, and tragedy fixes evermore the steady gaze of mankind. Genius is its own interpreter ; it makes few mistakes. Hawthorne wrote four novels and seven or eight short stories, all turning on sin, and he never errs in its analysis, its operation, or its effect, — though he stops short of finality. His characters are infallibly true to themselves. He is always logical. The environment suits the case down to slightest details. Nature conforms to the tragedy, either illuminating or darkening the play as it goes on, but always with rigid fidelity. His entire work is bathed in truth. Never does he weaken its absoluteness by introducing his personal belief, though occasionally, in his Note-Books, he gives us a glimpse of himself, like this : “ When I write anything that I know or suspect to be morbid, I feel as though I had told a lie.”

He has no theory of his own ; it is the same old story: eating forbidden fruit; hiding from God ; losing Paradise; tempted of woman ; tempted of Satan ; tempted of Mammon; sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption ; a deceived heart feeding on ashes ; death the wages of sin, — and no clear glimpse of a way out. If stated in modern phrase, it would be this : whatever a man does, he does to himself. There is no profounder truth in morals or religion, or in life than this. The Puritan theology obscured it in its doctrine of sin and of redemption. Both were weakened by over-localization outside of the man himself — putting sin in the progenitor of the race, and redemption into imputation and an expiatory process. However uncertainly these doctrines are held to-day, they still cast a blinding shadow upon ethics, and make it difficult to persuade men that whatsoever they sow they shall reap.

It is enough to say of Hawthorne, at this point, that nowhere in literature is this truth taught more clearly, — with such freedom from the alloy of dogmatic obscuration, with such absence of personal prejudice,—one might almost say of feeling, —with such solemnity, such tragic force and poetic beauty, and, above all, such closeness to life, as are to be found in these four novels and the stories.

We will take a closer look at the greatest of them. What shall be said of the Scarlet Letter; where shall it be located in the realm of Letters ? It is not a love story, nor a romance, nor an allegory, nor a parable, nor a historical novel, though it has something of each. It comes near being a dogma set in terms of real life, and made vivid by intense action; but Hawthorne cared nothing for dogma of any sort. What then shall it be called ? It must go without classification. It is a study of a certain form of sin made graphic by conditions best calculated to intensify each feature. Mrs. Hawthorne said that during the six months he was writing it, his forehead wore a knot. So will the reader’s, if he reads as carefully as Hawthorne wrote.

It was published in 1850, when Hawthorne was forty-six years of age. It has, first of all, this distinction : it is — as Mr. James says — " the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the country.” In the half-century since, a true and full American literature has been produced ; authors of high merit have secured a lasting place ; and others of less merit have given us works of fiction that sell almost by the million, but none that are worthy to stand by the side of this short story of sin and shame and remorse. What is claimed for it in this country is freely accorded abroad, though, of course, no comparisons are made with the long annals of English literature, where there are names that defy comparison. It is, however, read more widely there than here, and is held in steadier estimate than we accord, who read as gregariously as sheep crop the grass. We simply state the consensus in which it is held in our American world of letters when we say that it is the most consummate work in literature yet produced in this country.

The explanation of the permanent high estimate of the Scarlet Letter — for it would be as safe to wager on it as on the Bank of England — is the absolute perfection of its art and corresponding subtilty and correctness of thought, and, not least, a style that both fascinates and commands. If it is criticised on slight points, — as that it has too much symbolism, that the story is mixed with parable, and the like, — we grant or deny as we see fit; but we brush all this aside, we turn to the book again and close it with a sigh, or something deeper than a sigh, — even thought, and pronounce it perfect.

It is a simple story, told of a simple age, Greek in its severity, having only four characters : a wife forgetful of her vows; a clergyman forgetful of more than his vows ; a wronged husband, left in England, but brought forward ; a little child, — these and no more, save the people, individually unimportant, but necessary to form a background for the tragedy. Boston is not yet half a century old, Puritan to the core, hot still with a hatred of the tyranny and sin it had crossed the ocean to escape, governed by the letter of Scripture wherein was found the command that an adulteress should die. But some mercy had begun to qualify the Hebrew code, and instead of death or branding with a hot iron, Hester Prynne was condemned to stand upon the pillory-platform, wearing upon her breast the letter A wrought in scarlet, not only then, but ever after. With her babe in her arms she faces the people, and sees her husband among them, — an old and learned man, — who unexpectedly appears and takes his place as an avenger. The real history of the tragedy begins when the young minister, Mr. Dimmesdale, is required by the magistrate to appeal to Hester to reveal the partner of her guilt. Dimmesdale is at no time in the story represented as wholly contemptible. However sinful his characters may be, Hawthorne always clothes them with a certain human dignity. From the first he is the victim of his sin, — suffering the tortures of remorse to a degree impossible to Hester, because to the first sin he added that of concealment and hypocrisy by continuing in his holy office ; and, heavier than all, was the sense that he was dragging the cause, in both church and state, for which the colony was founded, down to the level of his own degradation. It was not for this that Hester, when adjured by him, refused to make the declaration for which he called, but for love only. The story, at the outset, is lifted out of all carnality. Shame and remorse have burned up that dross, until in time only the capacity to suffer is left, while in her heart love remains, — pure always, and made purer by acquiescence in her punishment and the discipline of motherhood. The story moves on, most human, but inexorable as fate. The scarlet letter on Hester’s breast almost ceases to do its office. A sense of desert and undying love and pity make her shame endurable. But Dimmesdale finds no relief. The scarlet letter burns itself into his flesh, and he dies in late confession for love, if not for his soul.

It would be difficult to find elsewhere so close an analysis of the play of the soul in the supreme moments of life as that of the leading characters, — all brought to the logical conclusion of their history. The blending of spiritual insight and literary art forms one of those triumphs the like of which one may look for in vain until one reaches the great masters in drama. It also suggests a problem in theology that has vexed the souls of men from the beginning, and will continue to vex them so long as sin and conscience stand opposed to each other. The problem is that of forgiveness : is it ever fully won ? The plot goes no further than their contrasted destiny. The curtain drops when the chief actor dies. If here and there it is lifted for a moment, or swept aside by some gust of irrepressible grief, it springs from hope, not from the main purpose. It is in Hester that riddance from sin comes nearest a possibility. Her acceptance and patient endurance of her penalty, without suffering it wholly to break her heart or her will, become a natural and real atonement that yields, if not peace, something of more value. The current of her life ran on in its natural channel in the light of day, before the eyes of the people. The contrast at the last between her strength and his weakness was not between a strong woman and a weak man, — each such by nature, — but between them as each came to be under the discipline of the seven years of experience so differently borne. Dimmesdale was not originally a weak man ; had he been, the story would have lost point and emphasis, and would have sunk to the level of a vulgar scandal of every-day life. Hawthorne quickly lifts the narrative out of that region, and confines it to the world where only moral and spiritual forces fill the stage. But under the concealment of his sin Dimmesdale gave way at every point; all the sources of his strength were dried up by the hypocrisy in which he had wrapped himself, and he grew steadily weaker, while Hester gained a certain robustness of will without loss of her love. Hawthorne here comes very near preaching. Indeed, he seldom does anything else ; it is the function of genius to preach. Give him a text, put on him the Geneva gown, and you have a preacher of universal orthodoxy fulfilling his calling with awful veracity.

But Hawthorne will not allow the tragedy to sink into the hopelessness of reprobation, — not that he cared for the doctrine one way or the other, but, as an interpreter of evil and as a literary artist, he could not leave Dimmesdale absolutely where his sin placed him ; for, in one character, he saw that evil, simply because it is evil, is a mystery, and as an artist he could not map out human passion in mathematical lines. It had stripped Dimmesdale of all that was best, obscured his judgment, defeated his love, blinded him to the distinction between good and evil, overthrown his will, involved his body in the sin of his soul, and brought him to the verge of death ; but something is left that revives as soon as he clasps the hand of his child, and — leaning on Hester — he mounts the scaffold where she at first had stood alone and taken on herself the punishment he should have shared with her. Under his decision to confess he revives, and begins to move aright. The scene changes. Each character is transformed. Confession begins to do its work. A far step is taken in the next word : “ ‘ Is not this better,’ murmured he, ' than what we dreamed of in the forest ? ’ ” — meaning flight together, at Hester’s suggestion, for his sake. Here he regains something of himself ; better to die a true man than to flee a false one. Hester can see the matter in but one light. She had slowly worked out a conscious redemption through " shame, despair, and solitude.” She had not sunk to his depth, and she could not rise to the height to which confession was lifting him. She cannot escape the constraint of her love and pity. She had freed herself ; she thought she could free him. " ' I know not,’ she replied. ' Better ? yea: so we may both die, and little Pearl die with us ! ’ ” In Hester the passion of love dominates ; let it be death if we can die together; but in him the passion of a soul achieving deliverance from sin in the only possible way is stronger, and he is ready to die even if it be alone. He exults in the confession he is about to make before the people. It is the fifty-first Psalm over again. Had Hawthorne read St. Augustine ? Or was it the insight of genius brooding in long silence on the way of a guilty soul emerging from the hell of measureless sin ? Nowhere does Hawthorne rise so high in tragic skill and power as in the confession that follows when Dimmesdale uncovers his breast and shows burnt into his flesh the letter Hester had worn openly upon her bosom. Here are the stigmata of the early saints, brought out by sin instead of by self-absorption in the crucified One. The final and only atonement is made, and he sinks upon the scaffold to die. Forgiving his tormentor whom he had wronged, he turns to his child where the tragedy completes itself.

Pearl is the one consummate flower of Hawthorne’s genius, — unsurpassed by himself and absolutely original. There is woven into her the entire history of these two suffering but diverse souls, which she must fulfill and yet preserve her perfect childhood. She sets forth the sin of her parents without a trace of its guilt, yet reflects the moral chaos in which it had involved her. This is done with matchless art: — “ an elf child,” the people called her, passing from one mood to another as though a double nature, an Undine as yet without soul, but restless because it is withheld; or, as Mr. Dimmesdale himself had described her, having no 44 discoverable principle of being save the freedom of a broken law ; ” and there is added a far-reaching word : 44 whether capable of good, I know not.” Hawthorne does not here hint at inheritance of natural disposition, but has in mind a possible transmission of the confusion springing out of a violation of the moral order. It was not a dream of human love that passed into her being, but something stronger than love.

His thought here runs very deep. This child of guilty passion inherited not the passion, but a protesting conscience that always put her at odds with herself. As Chillingworth was the malignant conscience that destroyed Dimmesdale, Pearl was the natural conscience that wholesomely chastened her mother so long as the inevitable penalty lasted. This ministration is strikingly brought out in the profoundest chapter of the book, where Hester’s inner life is disclosed. One is tempted, as one follows it, to ask if Hawthorne suffered his own thoughts to wander into the region where the question of woman’s place and rights in human society was undergoing heated discussion. The din of it filled his ears unless he closed them, as he usually did when anything like reform met them. But in this tender and sympathetic chapter he tells where Hester’s thoughts often led her, and where she surely would have followed them had she been free to fulfill her dreams. It certainly was where his thoughts would not have gone. But as in Tennyson’s Princess a child solved the problem, so here Pearl and motherhood dispelled her dreams and kept her within the lines of natural duty. In every case Pearl dominates the situation, whether she be regarded as a symbolized conscience or as a child. The story throughout is a drama of the spirit; the real and the spiritual play back and forth with something more than metaphor, for each is both real and spiritual. She is woven with endless symbolism into every page ; from the first wail in the prison where she was born, the child sets the keynote and keeps it to the end. The brook in the forest ran through black shadows and through sunshine, and babbled in two voices. “ ‘ What does this sad little brook say, mother ? ’ inquired she. ‘ If thou hadst a sorrow of thine own, the brook might tell thee of it, even as it is telling me of mine.’ ” Here is a sermon in running brooks deeper than the Duke heard, —the response of nature to the inner spirit of man.

But this contradiction that ran through the child passes away as soon as the purpose of confession enters the heart of Dimmesdale, whom before she had shunned so long as he and her mother talked of flight. As the two meet upon the scaffold after treading their bitter but diverse paths, and become spiritually one through this confession, the child mingles her life with theirs through the truth that now invests them, and proves that “she has a heart by breaking it.” Here we have the purest idealism, Greek in the delicacy of its allusions, and Hebrew in its ethical sincerity. What Hawthorne has in mind all along is that a sin involving hypocrisy can in no way be undone or gotten over except by confession, and so getting back into the truth. Dramatic art requires that it shall involve all the actors, — Chillingworth as well as Hester. Though a wronged husband, he was fiendish in his revenge, and as false as Dimmesdale. Any other writer of Romance would have hurled him to a doom of fire or flood. But Hawthorne has other uses for him. He is the malignant conscience of Dimmesdale as Pearl is the beneficent conscience of Hester. All the dramatis personæ must be subdued into the likeness of the common motive ; and so Hawthorne places Chillingworth on the scaffold, where the mingled atmosphere of unconquerable love and repentance enfolds him. He calls it a defeat; “ thou hast escaped me,” he said to Dimmesdale ; but it was more than defeat. Hawthorne leaves room for the thought at least that something of good found its way into his poor soul and stayed there.

We must acquit Hawthorne here, and on every other page of his works, from aiming at mere effect, but we cannot fail to see that in this last scene he comes near losing himself and letting his pity carry him beyond the point where the logic of his story left Dimmesdale; for to have wholly absolved him from his sin would have carried the writer beyond his purpose to unfold the working of broken law, — a thing not to be tampered with by an over-sympathetic pen. Hawthorne was neither a skeptic, nor a pessimist, nor a cold-hearted man; he was widely the reverse of each. It was the intensity of his faith in the moral laws and in the reality of goodness, and the delicacy and strength of his sympathy, that made him capable of writing in an unfailing strain of justice tempered, but not set aside, by pity.

But behind these qualities was the artistic sense, which — in a great man — is one with his power and insight, and he could write only what he saw and knew; for art is authoritative. Tennyson was once asked why he did not give In Memoriam a happier ending, — a Paradiso with its vision of God instead of a great hope only. He replied, “ I have written what I have felt and known, and I will never write anything else.” Hawthorne could say the same of himself; and we might add that his sense of art, as well as his sense of truth, held him in leash. His reserve, however temperamental, is a sign of his consummate skill as a literary artist. On what page, in what sentence, does he fall short ? The reader turns over the last page and feverishly demands the next scene in the tragedy, but finds only hints or nothing at all ; the characters sink back into the mystery from which they emerged. They move like spirits in a world unreal except as their truth makes it real. Hence their intangibleness ; they haunt one in the guise of the quality they set forth, but beyond that they do not exist. They stand for no person, but only for some law — kept or broken — which they symbolize. There is no Dimmesdale, nor Hester, nor Pearl, nor Chillingworth, but only shadows of broken law working out its consequences in ways of penalty wrought into the Eternal Order. They stay but a moment, and — like a faded pageant — disappear; but while they stay, the deepest meanings of life are set before us in forms of transcendent power, and become permanent in ourselves.

This ready impartation of ideas is everywhere a marked feature of Hawthorne’s works, due to the absolute sincerity of their ethical elements, their perfection of literary form, and their pervasive humanity. To doubt the last factor is to rob his genius of its mainspring. The severity of his treatment grows out of the accuracy of his logic. He deals with mystery and, therefore, says little, only enough to show that whatever a man does he does to himself ; that obedience is light, and disobedience is darkness in which, because nothing can be seen, there is nothing to be said.

Still, Hawthorne does not hold it to be contrary to his opinions or his art to suffer gleams of hope to illumine even the darkest of his pages. With a masterly touch at the very beginning of the Scarlet Letter, he expressly states this to be a feature of the story he is about to tell. He puts by the door of the prison, where Hester was confined, “ a wild rosebush,” and says, " it may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow.” Therefore, in the last scene there are almost forecasts of a good outcome. In the child the spell that drove her apart from her father is broken, and with tears she kisses his dying lips. Hester raises the unconquerable question of love: “ ' Shall we not spend our immortal life together ? Thou lookest far into eternity with those bright dying eyes ! Then tell me what thou seest ? ’ ” Hester was mistaken. Her cleansed eyes could see, but his could not with any certainty ; he had lived in the dark too long for clear vision. And yet Hawthorne will not hide the end behind so dark a pall. The rose at the prison door blossoms into a hope. The moralizing of the great master is not forgotten : “ There is some soul of goodness in things evil.” Dimmesdale remembers that there is recovery through suffering, and that it is a sign of mercy. Having set his ignominy before the people, his death becomes triumphant, and he departs with words of praise and submission. Still, Hawthorne will neither assert nor deny, but leaves each to read the story in his own way.

It is not well to look for a doctrine in this masterly and carefully balanced picture. Hawthorne did not intend one; he drew from a broader field than that of dogma. One may hope where one cannot well believe. Belief is special; hope is universal. Dimmesdale stated his own case correctly, — a confused and conflicting statement, because having long lived a lie its bewildering confusion impregnated all his thought. In Hester life has done its worst and its best, and, brooded over continually by truth, she emerges clear-eyed, and sees — shall we say heaven or hell ? — She cared not, so long as she could be with him. One is here reminded of Dante’s Francesca in the Inferno, “ swept about the never resting blast ” of hell with Paolo, — her only consolation being that they would never be separated. Mr. Dinsmore, who calls attention to this resemblance in his able book, the Teachings of Dante, thinks that Hawthorne — not having then learned Italian — came to it alone. It may well be so, for it is the quality of love to transcend all motives beside its own ; and not seldom does it cast itself with loss of all that it has in time or eternity, for so it chooses, rather than give up itself, — not voluptuous love, but that spiritual passion which makes of two souls one. They have no life if they are separated. Such was Hester’s love. Penance had not weakened, but rather had refined it, until its spiritual essence only was left with its commanding power. This Hawthorne sees by the light of his own genius. But to unwind the thread of human fault, and hold it up so that it shall shine in a brighter color, is a task that he hints at, but does not attempt.

Still, he touches sin with a firm hand, and traces it without flinching to the point where it culminates, — always the same ; it separates man from God and his fellows, and at last from himself ; it returns in retribution, and the evil he has done to others he does to himself. A casual reading may set this down as a Puritan dogma. It is Puritan, but it is universal before it is Puritan. Hawthorne in his greater works touched nothing that was only and distinctively Puritan. His characters wear the garb, but underneath is simply the human soul. This distinction is to be made because it helps to a right understanding of the book, and redeems both it and its author from the charge of provincialism, — a derogation not to be made concerning a genius whose province lay among themes as broad and universal as human nature.

Hawthorne put no unmeaning words into the Scarlet Letter, and the question may arise how far he intended to include Chillingworth in the scene of redemption on the scaffold, — for such it may be called. The answer must be found in Chillingworth’s exclamation: “Thou hast defeated me ! ” Why did he say that? Because Dimmesdale had taken himself out of the world of lies, and put himself into the hands of the God of truth, and thus brought not only himself, but all about him, under the redeeming influences that filled the air, for even the people went home, as it were, smiting their breasts. If the story be a parable, the harassing conscience must be set at rest; it is defeated, and Chillingworth no longer has a vocation. Dimmesdale had done what he had advised him to do: “Wouldst thou have me to believe, O wise and pious friend, that a false show can be better — can be more for God’s glory, or man’s welfare — than God’s own truth ? ” . His advice, given in answer to Dimmesdale’s specious paltering with an eternal reality, deepened his victim’s agony and so fed his revenge ; but when acted on, his patient passed beyond his reach. He had gone deeper than he knew, and had brought to the surface a spiritual power that outmastered his own. Shall we say that Hawthorne did not intend to hint that Chillingworth came under this greater power, and that, finding himself a defeated man through his own suggestion, he felt its divineness ? He utters no word of malice, no confident boast, no plan of further revenge. Instead, what else is seen of him is beneficent, and in accord with a nature originally sound and high-minded. Along with others, he has been involved in a furious storm of human passion, but it passes by when truth wins the victory. Hawthorne, like the consummate artist that he is, never asserts or paints in full, but only intimates and leaves the rest to the reader ; and so we may believe that the tragedy pauses at the door of Chillingworth. At the close Hawthorne plays uncertainly and with jest over this strange yet natural character. Chillingworth is reduced to nothingness and withers away, — a logical end, but he reappears in a new light as enriching Hester and Pearl, — a strange thing to do unless some goodness is left in him. Then the author jests and sends him literally to the devil where “ he would find tasks enough,” and receive “ his wages duly.” If Hawthorne ever falters it is when he plays between the Parable and the Romance. Here he drops the former, and ends his story — in Walter Scott fashion — with a word for each. Evidently he writes with a weary pen, yet not with an unpitying heart. In the next sentence he would fain be merciful to “ all these shadowy beings, so long our near acquaintances, — as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions ; ” and finally, after a bit of psychological byplay, by no means serious, — on the possible identity at bottom of hatred and love, — raises the question whether the old physician and the minister may not find " their earthly stock of hatred and antipathy transmitted into golden love.” Thus, though the Scarlet Letter is a sad book, the author would not leave it black with hopeless sorrow. Even as an artist Hawthorne knew better than to paint his canvas in sober colors only ; and as a man he had no right to bruise the human heart with needless pain. Sad as the Scarlet Letter is, we need not think him forgetful of Madame Necker’s saying that “ the novel should paint a possible better world.” But if better, it can be such only through truth and never through lies.

What renders the Scarlet Letter one of the greatest of books is the sleuthhound thoroughness with which sin is traced up and down and into every corner of the heart and life, and even into nature, where it transforms all things. Shakespeare paints with a larger brush, and sets it in great tragic happenings; but its windings, the subtle infusion of itself into every faculty and impressing itself upon outward things, are left for Hawthorne’s unapproachable skill. This leads us to speak of the criticism of Mr. Henry James upon the twelfth chapter, where the story reaches its climax. Dimmesdale and Hester and Pearl stand at night upon the scaffold, where Hester had stood alone with her babe seven years before. His remorse had reached its lowest depth ; its sting lay in the fact that she wore the scarlet letter while he went clad in robes of unquestioned sanctity. It is the letter that torments him, and carries the guilt and shame of the whole bitter history. He has come into a condition where, because he can think of nothing else, he can see nothing else.

A meteor flashes across the black sky and paints upon a cloud the fatal letter. A page of magnificent writing describes the objective picture and the heart within which only it exists. Mr. James regards it as overworked, and, along with a general charge of the same over-doing here and there, intimates that the author “ is in danger of crossing the line that separates the sublime from its intimate neighbor.” That Hawthorne should be termed ridiculous after being described as “a thin New Englander with a miasmatic conscience ” should occasion no surprise. It shows how wide apart are the realist and the idealist; and also how much nearer the idealist comes to the facts of the case in hand.

That Dimmesdale should transfer what he saw and felt within to the external world is a well-known psychological possibility; and we appeal from the realist to his brother the psychologist, who says in his recent book that “ it is one of the peculiarities of invasions from the sub-conscious region to take on objective appearances.” It is needless to say that literature, from the Bible down, abounds in this transfer of inward feeling to outward form. When Balaam had sold his prophetic gift for a price, it was not the ass that rebuked him, but his own smiting conscience. It was not the witches, but Macbeth, who sang, " Fair is foul, and foul is fair,” — after which all things were inverted : his thoughts became ghosts and daggers and a knocking at the gate like thunders of doom. Lady Macbeth can see nothing but blood on her white hands. Beckford in his Vathek (where possibly Hawthorne found the suggestion of Dimmesdale’s habit of placing his hand upon his heart) made the dwellers in the Hall of Eblis happy in all things except that each held his hand over his heart, which had become “ a receptacle of eternal fire.” Mr. James seems to underestimate the mental condition into which Dimmesdale has fallen; he strikes the key of the tragedy too low, and refers what he regards as excessive to Hawthorne’s Puritanism. Now, Puritanism is a capacious thing, but it cannot hold all that is cast into it; and much is set down to its credit that belongs to a false conception of it. Mr. James, in his able biography, insists on two things, to which we have already referred, as explanatory of Hawthorne ; that he was provincial, and that he was largely influenced by hi3 Puritan blood. Each is to be taken with due allowance. Of course, every man, however great his genius, strikes his roots down into native soil and draws his life from such air as is about him. Something of root and air will enter into his mental composition, and in some measure he will think with or from his environment, and his heart will throb with ancestral blood. But it is a quality of genius that it is not subject to such limitations. Genius belongs to the domain of nature ; it is cosmic, spiritual, universal. It treats these limitations in one of three ways : it lifts them into their ideals ; it transcends them ; or it extracts their thin essence or spirit. The last may be said of Hawthorne. Little of Puritanism remained in him except its spirituality, by which we mean its profound sense of the reality of moral law. Much that is set down to him as Puritan was a family idiosyncrasy, — an individualism that passed all the bounds of early or later Puritanism. It favored, however, the play of his genius in its chosen field.

To regard him as provincial because Salem was provincial, or because habits were simple in Massachusetts in the first half of the century, is to miss the source of his strongest quality. Hawthorne, by virtue of his brooding solitude and the lofty character of his thought, which was rooted in his own peculiar genius and was fed by an imagination that had no need to go outside of itself for ideas or theories, was shut off from provincialism save perhaps in some matters of personal habit. The nearest sign of it was an intense love of New England and indifference to the mother country where he had lived for years, — an unweaned child of his native land. There is more in him that offsets Puritanism than identifies him with it. In fact, it outdid itself, as has continually happened, and created in Hawthorne an individualism that separated him from itself. A system whose central principle is individualism cannot count upon holding together its own adherents. It is by its own nature centrifugal, though none the worse for that; it makes man a denizen of the heavens rather than of this mundane sphere. But the way is long, and at great cost is it trod.

It is Hawthorne’s peculiarity that he cannot be identified with any school of thought. He was a recluse down to the last fibre. He did not hate men, but he would not mingle with them. He was shy, but in a lofty way. Any real alliance in thought or action with others was impossible to him. His individualism was absolute, but it was temperamental. Socially he was closely identified with the transcendental way of thinking, but it found no access to his mind. He and Emerson were neighbors, but not intimates. When they walked together in Concord they discussed the weather and the crops, but not philosophy, nor religion, nor politics. Oftener they were silent, as great men, who know each other as such, can afford to be. Tennyson and Carlyle once sat together of an evening for three hours, smoking, and neither uttering a word, except Carlyle’s good-night: u Come again, Alfred; we have had a grand time.” This aloofness from men, and at the same time this power of dragging to light the hidden secrets of their souls, is the inexplicable gift of genius ; it has an eye of its own ; one glance, and it looks the man through and through. He mingled frequently with the North Adams frequenters of the village tavern, but he was off on the mountain-side, among the limekilns, weaving the threads of Ethan Brand. He spent a year at Brook Farm, but spoke lightly of its socialism and of his own part as “ chambermaid to the oxen,” — a wasted year, but it gave us the Blithedale Romance, which Mr. James places at the head of his works. He hated Socialism, but Puritanism, its opposite, — being spiritual and social individualism, — won in him no following save as it furnished him standing ground and materials for his work. Had he lived anywhere where conscience and law had full recognition and sin was possible, he would have written in the same strain,—as in the Marble Faun, where Donatello serves his purpose as well as Dimmesdale. The crime and its effect in each belong to the general field of ethics, where sin reveals its nature in soul experiences that are common to all men. Indeed, he has but one deep and permanent interest: the play of conscience under sin. He is a student of the soul. He watches its play as a biologist watches an animal under varying conditions; but in each case it is the study of a soul, — not degraded, but only wounded, as it were, and while it is keen to feel, and while the good and evil in it are full of primal energy.

It is sometimes said, in halfway derogation of Hawthorne’s genius, that his tales are parables. Why should they not be so regarded ? It is not easy to escape the parable, in literature or in life. What are the world and humanity but parables of the Eternal Mind ? The only question in literature is, are the parables well told ? If they are, the witness of a vast company of great authors in all ages and tongues is theirs. Hawthorne was full of dreams, fantasies, symbols, and all manner of spiritual necromancy,— turning nature into spirit and spirit back into nature, but—however wild the play of his imagination — the idea underlying it always has three characteristics : it is real, and true, and moral. Hence, the Scarlet Letter, — devoid of history and of probability ; illusive ; nature transformed to create and to receive meanings; personality sunk in ideas and ideas made personal; so far away that our hearts do not reach it with sympathy, and it is read with unwet eyes, but with thoughts that lie too deep for tears ; — still it is one of the truest and most moral of books, because the human soul that lies behind it and plays through it is true to itself whether it does good or evil. Hawthorne knew evil under its laws. Neither sentiment, nor art, nor dogma deflected him from seeing the thing as it is, and setting it down with relentless accuracy. His claim to genius would be impeached if it were not accurate; and the reason why it stands clear and unquestioned is because no taint of morbidness nor Puritan inheritance lessens the absolute veracity of his estimates. Each may have had something to do with the selection of his subjects, but nothing whatever with his own ethical opinions. His literary art and execution, faultless as they are, would not alone secure for him the admiration and reverence of all lovers of good literature. For, at last, it is truth alone for which men care ; and truth only is strong enough to win unquestioned and universal verdicts.

And yet he is criticised on the score that the Scarlet Letter, especially, is sad, and sometimes it is added that it is pessimistic. So are Lear and Balzac’s Alkahest sad, but neither deserves the latter term. Nothing in literature is pessimistic that accurately describes a violation of the order of the world and of human life, if it be in the interest of truth and justice. Dimmesdale and Hester could not escape the pangs they suffered; they were not going through their parts in a world of pessimism, but in a world of order which they had violated, and for which they were undergoing inevitable yet redemptive penalty. There is no pessimism so long as the just laws of society are working normally, — the very point on which Hawthorne insists, — however hard they are bearing on the individual. Pessimism is an indictment of the moral order of the world, and is essential atheism. Hawthorne stood at the opposite pole. His main function in literature was to illustrate the tragical consequences of broken law when the law was fundamental in character or in society. He was almost slavishly logical, — putting Dimmesdale into the lowest hell of the Inferno, and Hester in Purgatorio, where penalty purifies and makes the sufferer glad.

Absolute as was his insight, and perfect as was his art, he has not escaped criticism. There is general agreement that his pages are overcharged with symbolism. But which flower will you uproot in that garden “ of a thousand hues,” though “ Narcissus that still weeps in vain ” blossoms too often there ?

Graver criticism is sometimes heard, — as that he has no sympathy with his characters in their suffering. So far as it touches the Scarlet Letter it should be sufficient refutation to read what he himself says in his English Note-Books, in comparing Thackeray’s “ coolness in respect to his own pathos,” with his own emotions when he read the last scene of the Scarlet Letter to his wife, just after writing it, — " tried to read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved, as if I were tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm.”

It is not well to search an author too closely as to his feeling over the creatures of his imagination. You may find nothing or everything, according to temperament or literary sense. The great author hides himself behind his canvas. Hawthorne, the most reticent of men and with the keenest sense of literary propriety, is the most impersonal of writers in his greater works. He tells us nothing except what may be inferred from characteristics constantly recurring throughout his pages. Now nothing is more revealing in an author than his style; it is almost a better witness to his character than his assertions. It is like the voice in conversation that speaks from the soul rather than the mind. There are in Hawthorne’s style four invariable features, — reverence, sincerity, delicacy, and humanity; each is nearly absolute. Together they stand for heart. No matter how silently it throbs, a writer who puts these qualities into his pages is to be counted as one who pities his fellow men even when most relentless in tracing their sins. It may also be set down as a general principle, that truth is akin to pity, as pity is akin to love. The great virtues do not lie far apart.

The criticism is oftenest urged in connection with Hester, who is both the centre of interest and of the problem. Hawthorne takes utmost pains to make i clear how she lived. Whether she was happy or not he did not undertake to say; he would not raise so useless a question. The tragedy is pitched at too high a key for happiness. Possibly there may be victory after slow-healing wounds, but there can be no amelioration by circumstance or by deadening of sensibility. Study the thirteenth chapter — Another View of Hester — if you would seek an answer to the question whether in her case the book gravitates toward despair or points to recovery and life.¹

This exquisite rehearsal of Christian service and temper might well win for her canonization. It is the picture of a saint. The very things that Christ made the condition of acceptance at the last judgment she fulfilled; and the graces that St. Paul declared to be the fruit of the Spirit were exemplified in her daily life. Plainly, this is not a picture of despair, nor even of suffering, except that which necessarily haunts a true soul that has done evil. God forbid that it should be different with any of us! Forgiveness is not lethean. To forget our past would defraud the soul of its heritage in life. The Scarlet Letter faded out and even acquired another meaning. Her life came to blessed uses, with rewards of love and gratitude from others that reached even unto death. The logic of this tender picture of a saintlylife — a gospel in itself — must not be overlooked. Hawthorne certainly did not mean that the reader should miss the point. How could recovery from sin be better told, or be more complete ? When Peter had denied his Lord and wept bitterly over it, all he was told to do was to feed his Master’s sheep. Hester’s forgiveness did not shape itself in the form of ecstatic visions, but of service in the spirit of Him who bore witness to the truth ; and by herself bearing witness to it she won the reward of its freedom.

To the last touch of his pen Hawthorne keeps up the symbolism that both hides and reveals his meaning, and leaves us in such a mood as when, on some autumn day, we watch mountain and river and sky faintly shrouded in haze until we wonder if these and life itself be real, — an experience tenderly rendered by Longfellow in his poem on Hawthorne. He lived in his dreams, but his dreams were as real as the earth and as true as life.

Strangers in Boston still search the burial ground of King’s Chapel for the grave of Hester Prynne : so true a story, they think, must be true in fact. If it had been found they might have asked, What does the armorial device mean ?

“ ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES.”

Does the scarlet letter stand for sin or for cleansing? Is the epitaph a word of despair or of hope ? In what direction did Hawthorne intend to lead our thought ? If asked, he would have said, Read out of your own heart.

Theodore T. Munger.