ompared Hawthorne's work with that of the German romancer, Tieck, and
it is interesting to find confirmation of this dictum in passages of
the _American Note Books_, in which Hawthorne speaks of laboring over
Tieck with a German dictionary. The _Twice-Told Tales_ are the work of
a recluse, who makes guesses at life from a knowledge of his own heart,
acquired by a habit of introspection, but who has had little contact
with men. Many of them were shadowy, and others were morbid and
unwholesome. But their gloom was of an interior kind, never the
physically horrible of Poe. It arose from weird psychological
situations like that of _Ethan Brand_ in his search for the
unpardonable sin. Hawthorne was true to the inherited instinct of
Puritanism; he took the conscience for his theme, and in these early
tales he was already absorbed in the problem of evil, the subtle ways
in which sin works out its retribution, and the species of fate or
necessity that the wrong-doer makes for himself in the inevitable
sequences of his crime. Hawthorne was strongly drawn toward symbols
and types, and never quite followed Poe's advice to abandon allegory.
The _Scarlet Letter_ and his other romances are not, indeed, strictly
allegories, since the characters are men and women and not mere
personifications of abstract qualities. Still, they all have a certain
allegorical tinge. In the _Marble Faun_, for example, Hilda, Kenyon,
Miriam, and Donatello have been ingeniously explained as
personifications respectively of the conscience, the reason, the
imagination, and the senses. Without going so far as this, it is
possible to see in these and in Hawthorne's other creations something
typical and representative. He uses his characters like algebraic
symbols to work out certain problems with; they are rather more and yet
rather less than flesh and blood individuals. The stories in
_Twice-Told Tales_ and in the second collection, _Mosses from an Old
Manse_, 1846, are more openly allegorical than his later work. Thus
the _Minister's Black Veil_ is a sort of anticipation of Arthur
Dimmesdale in the _Scarlet Letter_. From 1846 to 1849 Hawthorne held
the position of surveyor of the Custom House of Salem. In the preface
to the _Scarlet Letter_ he sketched some of the government officials
with whom this office had brought him into contact in a way that gave
some offense to the friends of the victims and a great deal of
amusement to the public. Hawth