V
THE GREAT ROMANCES SCARLET LETTER, HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES, BLITHEDALE ROMANCE, MARBLE FAUN
In addition to being an engrossing narrative and in every way a supreme illustration of Hawthorne’s art, The Scarlet Letter is a study in will power. Of the four human lives involved in this tragedy, that of Hester Prynne is the most absorbing, as her character is the loftiest. Carried to the place of shame, her dark Oriental beauty irradiates all about her, and she bears herself like a queen. Her punishment is her own, she will ask none to share it. Her sacrifice has been infinite, but it asks nothing in return. She bears with regal patience slight and insult, and that worst punishment of all, the wondering terror of little children, who flee her approach as of an evil thing.
Hawthorne has brought out with infinite skill the dreariness of the years following the public disgrace when Hester has no longer the help of a rebellious pride such as carried her almost exultantly through the first crises of the dungeon and the pillory. With a refinement of art the author adds one last bitter drop to Hester Prynne’s cup of bitterness in the wasting away of her superb beauty. But as the lines of her face hardened and the natural and external graces disappeared, the great soul waxed greater, more capable of love and pity and tenderness. She became a ministering angel whose coming was looked for as if she had indeed been sent from Heaven.
It was a singular fancy of Hawthorne’s to give Hester a child like Pearl, precocious, fitful, enigmatic, a will-o’-the-wisp, more akin to the ‘good people’ of legendary lore than to the offspring of human men and women. This too was a part of Hester’s discipline, that this un-human, elf-like creature should have sprung from her, with a power transcending that of other children to mix pain with pleasure in a mother’s life.
Looking at Roger Chillingworth as he appears in his ordinary life, one sees only the wise, benevolent physician, infinitely solicitous for the welfare of his young friend Arthur Dimmesdale. Surprise him when the mask of deep-thoughted benevolence is for the moment laid aside and it is the face of a demon that one beholds.
Without a grain of pity for his victim he probes the minister’s soul. Morbidly eager, he welcomes every sign that makes for his theory of a hidden, a mental rather than a physical sickness. He gloats with malignant joy over the discovery that this spiritually minded youth has inherited a strong animal nature. Here is a deep and resistless undercurrent of passion which has led to certain results. An unflinching and cruel analysis will make clear what those results have been. Suspicion becomes certainty, but proof is still wanting.
For terrible suggestiveness there are but few scenes in American fiction comparable with that where Chillingworth bends over the sleeping minister in his study and puts aside the garment that always closely covered his breast. The poor victim shuddered and slightly stirred. ‘After a brief pause, the physician turned away. But with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the eye and features, and therefore bursting through the whole ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Thus Satan might have comported himself when a precious human soul is lost to heaven and won into his kingdom. But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the trait of wonder in it!’
Dimmesdale is the deeply pathetic figure in this tragedy of souls. Seven years of hypocrisy might well bring the unhappy man to the pitiable condition in which he is found when the lines of interest in the story draw to a focus. Day by day, month by month, his was a life of lies. No course of action seemed open to the wretched minister which did not involve piling higher the mountain of falsehood. To lie and to scourge himself for lying—this was his whole existence. We praise Hester Prynne’s courage. Not less extraordinary was Dimmesdale’s wonderful display of will power. A weaker man would have confessed at once, or fled, or committed suicide. The minister may not be accused of stubbornly holding to his course from fear. He feared but one thing: the shock to the great cause for which he stood, the shame that the revelation of his guilt would bring upon the church, the loss of his power to do good, the spectacle, for the eyes of mocking unbelievers, of the ‘full-fraught man and best indued’ proved the guiltiest. This were indeed ‘another fall of man.’
Incomparable as The Scarlet Letter undoubtedly is, there are admirers of Hawthorne’s genius who have pronounced The House of the Seven Gables the better story of the two. The judgment may be erroneous, it is at least not eccentric.
In handling the genealogical details of the first chapter, Hawthorne showed a deft touch. The descendants of the proud old Colonel Pyncheon are as clearly defined as if the name and station of each had been enumerated. With no less ease does one follow the fortunes of the humble house of Matthew Maule. This progenitor of an obscure race had been executed for witchcraft. All of his descendants bore the stamp of this event. They were ‘marked out from other men.’ In spite of an exterior of good fellowship, there was a circle about the Maules, and no man had ever stepped foot inside of it. Unfortunate in its early history, this family was never other than unfortunate. It had an inheritance of sombre recollections, which it brooded upon, though unresentfully.