“In Adam’s fall we sinned all.” When they said that, they were thinking not of Adam, but of themselves. They did it; it was the guilt that was imputed to them. Sensitive consciences were tortured in the attempt fully to realize their guilt.
The real inheritors of this type of conscience were to be found among many of the radical reformers and agitators who were Hawthorne’s contemporaries and with whom he had little in common. When their formal creed had fallen off, there remained the sense of personal guilt for original sin. The sin of the nation and of the whole social order weighed heavily upon them and tortured them, and they found relief only in action.
All this was foreign to Hawthorne’s mind. In his treatment of sin there is always a sense of moral detachment. We are not made to see, as George Eliot makes us see, the struggle with temptation,—the soul, like a wild thing, seeing the tempting bait and drawing nearer to the trap. Hawthorne begins after the deed is done. He shows us the
wild thing taken in a trap
Which sees the trapper coming thro’ the wood.
Of what is the trap made? It is made of a deed already done. Whence comes the ghostly trapper? He is no stranger in the wood. There is no staying his advance as he makes his fatal rounds.
In the preface to the “House of the Seven Gables” the author gives the argument of the story,—“the truth, namely, that the wrong-doing of one generation lives into the successive ones, and, divesting itself of every temporary advantage, becomes a pure and uncontrollable mischief.”
This is the theme of the Greek tragedy—Nemesis. The deed is done and cannot be undone; the inevitable consequences must be endured.
In the “Scarlet Letter,” when Hester and Roger Chillingworth review the past and peer into the future, Hester says, “I said but now that there can be no good event for him or thee or me who are wandering together in this gloomy maze of evil, and stumbling at every step over the guilt wherewith we have strewn our path.”
But is the present stumbling guilt or is it merely misery? The old man replies, “By the first slip awry thou didst plant the germ of evil, but since that moment it has been a dark necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of typical illusion, neither am I fiend-like who have snatched a fiend’s office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as it may.”