Strange words to come from one who had sat in a Puritan meeting-house! It is such comment as the Greek Chorus might make watching the unfolding of the doom of the house of Agamemnon. And when the tale of the “Scarlet Letter” has been told, how does the author himself look upon it? How does he distribute praise and blame?
“To all these shadowy beings so long our near acquaintances—as well Roger Chillingworth as his companions—we would fain be merciful. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry whether love and hatred be not the same thing at bottom. Each in its utmost development supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart-knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for his spiritual life on another; each leaves the passionate lover or the no less passionate hater forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of its subject. Philosophically considered, therefore, the passions seem essentially the same except that one happens to be seen in celestial radiance and the other in a dusky lurid glow.” This is not the Puritan Conscience uttering itself. It is an illusive and questioning spirit.
If in his attitude toward human destiny Hawthorne was in some essential respects un-Puritan, so also was he un-modern. There is a characteristic difference between antique and modern symbols for those necessary processes, beyond the sphere of our own wills, by which our lives are determined. The ancients pictured it with austere simplicity. Life is a simple thread. The Fates spin it. It is drawn out on the distaff and cut off by the fatal shears.
Compare this with the phrase Carlyle loved to quote, “the roaring loom of Time.” Life is not a spinning-wheel, but a loom. A million shuttles fly; a million threads are inextricably interwoven. You cannot long trace the single thread; you can discern only the growing pattern. There is inevitable causation, but it is not simple but complex. The situation at the present moment is the result not of one cause but of innumerable causes, and it is in turn the cause of results that are equally incalculable. We are a part of
the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and air and sea.
Men of science show us how the whole acts upon each part and each part acts upon the whole. Modern novelists attempt, not always successfully, to give the impression of the amazing complexity of actual life, where all sorts of things are going on at the same time.
Whether we look upon it as his limitation or as his good fortune, Hawthorne adhered to the spinning-wheel rather than the loom. We see the antique Fates drawing out the thread. A long series of events follow one another from a single cause.
A part of the power of Hawthorne over our imagination lies in his singleness of purpose. In “The Marble Faun” we are told, “The stream of Miriam’s trouble kept its way through this flood of human life, and neither mingled with it nor was turned aside.”
We are made to see the dark streams that do not mingle nor turn aside, and we watch their fatal flow.