Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 094.djvu/215

Rh our casuistry is pervaded by ignorance of a thousand cumulative conditions, and this precludes him from judging peremptorily by the outward appearance. Masterly is his delineation of Hester in her life of penance—the general symbol at which preacher and moralist may point, and in which they may embody their images of frailty—and over whose grave the infamy she must carry thither will be her only monument. A mystic shadow of suspicion attaches itself to her little lonesome dwelling. Children, too young to comprehend why she should be shut out from the sphere of human charities, creep nigh enough to behold her plying her needle at the cottage-door, or labouring in her little garden, or coming forth along the pathway that leads townward; and then, discerning the scarlet letter on her breast, scamper off with a strange, contagious fear. She stands apart from moral interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt; no more smile with the household joy, nor mourn with the kindred sorrow; or, should it succeed in manifesting its forbidden sympathy, awakening only terror and horrible repugnance. Of a tale so told it may be well said that It is highly characteristic of our author to make little Pearl a source of wild foreboding to her remorseful mother. The elf-child is so freakish, tetchy, and wayward,—she has such strange, defiant, desperate moods,—she plays such fantastic sports, flitting to and fro with a mocking smile, which invests her with a certain remoteness and intangibility, as if she were hovering in the air, and might vanish like a glimmering light, whose whence and whither we know not,—that Hester cannot help questioning, many a time and oft, whether Pearl is a human child. Similarly it is devised that Hester should believe, with shuddering unwillingness, that the scarlet letter she wears has endowed her with a new sense, and given her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She is terror-stricken by the revelations thus made. Must she receive as truth these intimations, so obscure, yet so distinct? Surely, in all her miserable experience, there is nothing else so awful and so loathsome as this sense. What marvel if the vulgar, in those dreary old times, aver that the symbol is not merely scarlet cloth, tinged in an earthly dye-pot, but is red-hot with infernal fire, and can be seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walks abroad after dusk. "And, we must needs say, it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumour than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit." The picture is one that leaves an indelible impression on the mind. Nor may we forget to notice how skilfully the background is filled in, and in what excellent keeping with the foremost figures are the puritan, sombre shades behind. The patriarchal era of New England life found no such vivid and graphic a painter as Nathaniel Hawthorne, and it is evidently one which he knows to be his forte—witness the constancy of his attachment to its grim and rugged aspect.

Less powerful and pathetic, but at the same time less open to objection on grounds already stated, "The House of the Seven Gables" is a