les; but his true field as a story-teller is the
erring, questing, aspiring, shadowed human heart.

"The Scarlet Letter," for instance, is a study of a universal theme, the
problem of concealed sin, punishment, redemption. Only the setting is
provincial. The story cannot be rightly estimated, it is true, without
remembering the Puritan reverence for physical purity, the Puritan
reverence for the magistrate-minister--differing so widely from the
respect of Latin countries for the priest--the Puritan preoccupation
with the life of the soul, or, as more narrowly construed by Calvinism,
the problem of evil. The word Adultery, although suggestively enough
present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever devised by a
romancer, does not once occur in the book. The sins dealt with are
hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester Prynne, and Roger
Chillingworth are developing, suffering, living creatures, caught
inextricably in the toils of a moral situation. By an incomparable
succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the travail of their souls. In
the greatest scene of all, that between Hester and Arthur in the forest,
the Puritan framework of the story gives way beneath the weight of human
passion, and we seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution
than was actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But
though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless, no
mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the impotence of
all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of the intense reality
of spiritual things. "The law we broke," in Dimmesdale's ghostly words,
was a more subtle law than can be graven on tables of stone and numbered
as the Seventh Commandment.

The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of "The House of the Seven
Gables," which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a better
book than "The Scarlet Letter." Certainly this story of old Salem is
impeccably written and its subtle handling of tone and atmosphere is
beyond dispute. An ancestral curse, the visitation of the sins of the
fathers upon the children, the gradual decay of a once sound stock, are
motives that Ibsen might have developed. But the Norseman would have
failed to rival Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows,
and the no less masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark
inheritance through the love of the light-hearted Phoebe for the latest
descendant of the Maules. In "Th