tormented
young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own lapse from
pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends itself to
the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of his
guilt standing in the full glare of exposure and humbling herself to
the misery of atonement--between this more wretched and pitiable
culprit, to whom dishonour would come as a comfort and the pillory as
a relief, and the older, keener, wiser man, who, to obtain
satisfaction for the wrong he has suffered, devises the infernally
ingenious plan of conjoining himself with his wronger, living with
him, living upon him, and while he pretends to minister to his hidden
ailment and to sympathise with his pain, revels in his unsuspected
knowledge of these things and stimulates them by malignant arts. The
attitude of Roger Chillingworth, and the means he takes to compensate
himself--these are the highly original elements in the situation that
Hawthorne so ingeniously treats. None of his works are so impregnated
with that after-sense of the old Puritan consciousness of life to
which allusion has so often been made. If, as M. Montegut says, the
qualities of his ancestors _filtered_ down through generations into
his composition, _The Scarlet Letter_ was, as it were, the vessel that
gathered up the last of the precious drops. And I say this not because
the story happens to be of so-called historical cast, to be told of
the early days of Massachusetts and of people in steeple-crowned hats
and sad coloured garments. The historical colouring is rather weak
than otherwise; there is little elaboration of detail, of the modern
realism of research; and the author has made no great point of causing
his figures to speak the English of their period. Nevertheless, the
book is full of the moral presence of the race that invented Hester's
penance--diluted and complicated with other things, but still
perfectly recognisable. Puritanism, in a word, is there, not only
objectively, as Hawthorne tried to place it there, but subjectively as
well. Not, I mean, in his judgment of his characters, in any
harshness of prejudice, or in the obtrusion of a moral lesson; but in
the very quality of his own vision, in the tone of the picture, in a
certain coldness and exclusiveness of treatment.

The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an
abuse of the fanciful element--of a certain superficial symbolism. The
people strike me no