s interesting
to see how it borrowed a particular colour from the other faculties
that lay near it--how the imagination, in this capital son of the old
Puritans, reflected the hue of the more purely moral part, of the
dusky, overshadowed conscience. The conscience, by no fault of its
own, in every genuine offshoot of that sombre lineage, lay under the
shadow of the sense of _sin_. This darkening cloud was no essential
part of the nature of the individual; it stood fixed in the general
moral heaven, under which he grew up and looked at life. It projected
from above, from outside, a black patch over his spirit, and it was
for him to do what he could with the black patch. There were all sorts
of possible ways of dealing with it; they depended upon the personal
temperament. Some natures would let it lie as it fell, and contrive to
be tolerably comfortable beneath it. Others would groan and sweat and
suffer; but the dusky blight would remain, and their lives would be
lives of misery. Here and there an individual, irritated beyond
endurance, would throw it off in anger, plunging probably into what
would be deemed deeper abysses of depravity. Hawthorne's way was the
best, for he contrived, by an exquisite process, best known to
himself, to transmute this heavy moral burden into the very substance
of the imagination, to make it evaporate in the light and charming
fumes of artistic production. But Hawthorne, of course, was
exceptionally fortunate; he had his genius to help him. Nothing is
more curious and interesting than this almost exclusively _imported_
character of the sense of sin in Hawthorne's mind; it seems to exist
there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. He had ample
cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it
was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But
his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not
moral and theological. He played with it and used it as a pigment; he
treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively. He was not
discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and
regular victims, who had not the little postern door of fancy to slip
through, to the other side of the wall. It was, indeed, to his
imaginative vision, the great fact of man's nature; the light element
that had been mingled with his own composition always clung to this
rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers
about