frequent the green pastures through which they stray, and who have gazed idly or otherwise into the placid stream—finding therein, some at least, a magic mirror, from which they have departed in self-introspective mood, saying, "We have seen strange things to-day|"
There can be little question that the most powerful—if also the least pleasing—of Mr. Hawthorne’s fictions, is "The Scarlet Letter," a work remarkable for pathos in the tale, and art in the telling. Even those who are most inclined (and with reason) to demur to the plot, are constrained to own themselves enthralled, and their profoundest sensibilities excited by
The book along whose burning leaves
His scarlet web our wild romancer weaves.
The invention of the story is painful. Like the "Adam Blair" of Mr. Lockhart, it is a tale of "trouble, and rebuke, and blasphemy:" the trouble of a guilty soul, the rebuke of public stigma, and the occasion thereby given to the enemy to blaspheme. For, of the two fallen and suffering creatures whose anguish is here traced out, little by little, and line upon line, with such harrowing fidelity, one, and the guiltiest of the twain, is, like Adam Blair, a venerated presbyter, a pillar of the faith; the very burden of remorse which crushes his soul increases the effect of his ministrations, giving him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind—keeping him down on a level with the lowest¸—him, the man of etherial attributes, whose voice the angels might have listened to and answered: and thus his heart vibrates in unison with that of the fallen, and receives their pain into itself, and sends its own throb of pain through a thousand other breasts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence.
It has been objected to works of this class that they attract more persons than they warn by their excitement. Others have replied—"What is the real moral of any tale? is it not its permanent expression—the last burning trace it leaves upon the soul? and who ever read 'Adam Blair'"—we are citing the words of a critic of that book—"without rising from the perusal saddened, solemnised, smit with a profound horror at the sin which wrought such hasty havoc in a character so pure and a nature so noble? This effect produced, surely the tale has not been told in vain." However this may be, we find reviewers who moot the above objection to such fictions in general, avowing, with reference to the "Scarlet Letter" in particular, that if sin and sorrow in their most fearful forms are to be presented in any work of art, they have rarely been treated with a loftier severity, purity, and sympathy than here. What so many romancists would have turned into a fruitful hotbed of prurient description and adulterated sentiment, is treated with consummate delicacy and moral restraint by Mr. Hawthorne. As Miss Mitford observes, "With all the passionate truth that he has thrown into the long agony of the seducer, we never, in our pity for the sufferer, lose our abhorrence of the sin." How powerfully is depicted the mental strife, so tumultuous and incessant in its agitation, of the young clergyman, Arthur Dimmesdale—whom his congregation deem a miracle of holiness—the mouthpiece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love—the very ground he treads being sanctified in their eyes—the maidens growing pale before him—the aged members of his flock, beholding his frame so feeble (for he is dying daily of that within
