_How Nathaniel Hawthorne Exorcised Hester Prynne_
For twenty-five years America has been the classic country of
experimental psychology. The more vague and uncertain metaphysics
and ethics became in America, the more rigorous, exact and precise
became psychology. The Americans carried to the field of experimental
psychology their taste for statistics, formulæ and graphs. They set
about with a singular complacency, measuring and weighing with the
dynameter that human mind which their idealism had pictured, up to that
time, as so transcendental and intangible. Never was science carried
farther. Never was the thinking being submitted to such a test, gauged,
measured, weighed, counted. The results of experimental psychology
have passed into everyday practices. The psychological test and the
intelligence test are a part of the university program, and count
towards admission into the professions, the civil service and the army.
The American universities which are substituting psychological tests
for entrance examinations are becoming more and more numerous.
This development of experimental psychology in America is interesting.
It explains the obsession which the psychological problem has acquired
in the eyes of contemporary novelists. In America, as in Europe, the
novel has abandoned ethics for psychology. One could not form a just
idea of the American novel of to-day without bearing in mind at least
the principal lines of the development of experimental psychology in
America since William James.
* * * * *
James was the great renovator and the pioneer of psychological
studies in the United States. He was in psychology a true realist.
Anti-intellectualist through both education and temperament, he brought
psychology from the clouds to the earth; object and subject into the
world of facts. He eliminated all scholasticism from the study of
the self. He refused to subject the powers of the mind to empirical
classifications. He conceived the spiritual life as a continuous
creation. He condemned the division of the mind into autonomous
faculties. The ego appeared to him to be, not a marquetry of powers,
but a cluster of energy, one living and inseparable force, a current,
a river, a “stream of consciousness.” Nor does James consent to the
separation and classification into distinct _genres_ of the activities
of the mind. Art, mysticism, philosophy, science, ethics were in his
eyes but aspects, different in appearance but in reality identical, of
a single force; a happy confusion which permitted him, in his fine book
on “The Varieties of Religious Experience” to bring into a new light
the mystic phenomena, and which suggested to him an original philosophy
of religions based on a new conception of conscious life. The
importance which he attached to the subconscious and the confidence,
carried even to credulity, which he accorded to psychical researches
are well known.
From James, the contemporary psychologists borrowed a theory which
had a great success. I mean the studies on the dissociation of a
personality. The views on this subject of the author of the “Treatise
on Psychology” have their origin in his pragmatism. Desirous of
assuring to the mind the free and entire use of all its powers, James,
although a strong and confirmed realist, accorded but a representative
and symbolic character to spiritual events. They were epiphenomenal,
means chosen by the conscious activity to reach its ends and without
other than purely symbolic importance. He considered the facts of the
conscience not at all the equivalent of the facts of reality, but as
symbols representing much less things themselves than the interest we
take in them. Nothing can be more original than his hierarchy of the
“Selves.” His mistrust for abstraction had caused him to form a very
curious theory. He distinguished three orders of Self; the material
Self which he reduced to the sensations of our body, of our clothes and
of our surroundings; the social Self; and the spiritual Self. According
to him, every individual possesses several social Selves; in fact,
there are as many as there are groups which recognize them. Each one of
these Selves acts in its group like an independent personality. Each
has its own fashion of acting and reacting. In the same individual the
different Selves may oppose each other, according to the social groups
in which they develop.
There we have the starting point of a theory which is now well known
and which Pirandello, James Joyce and Marcel Proust have illustrated
in literature. It has its origin in this principle: that, in order to
persevere in their being, individuals disguise themselves and present
to the exterior world surrogate creations of their ego. Inspired
by these doctrines, modern psychology has modified its consecrated
terminology. It has recently replaced the word “character,” a classic
and moralizing term, by a newer stamp--that of “personality picture.”
It gives of the Self an interpretation no longer moral but æsthetic.
According to this theory, the events of our inner life are fictions
that we play on ourselves and on others. Each one of us chooses a
personality, a character--or better, a travesty, a representation--and
we pass our life in furthering and defending it. According to the
surroundings and the different groups through which we pass, and in
accordance with the necessities of the moment, we modify this personal
portrait, deforming or attenuating it if we are weak, strengthening
and enriching it if we are strong. The normal individual paints his
personal portrait to suit the background of the external world; the
neurotic, on the contrary, attributes to his fiction an intrinsic value
independent of experience. In any case, we are essentially actors,
mimics and parodists.
This Self of which we take possession is a veritable psychic creation.
It is a character which we spend our life in designing. It is our
personal portrait signed by our self, “a personality picture.”
According to a modern psychologist--Doctor Martin--every one of us
is an artist and spends his life in drawing an original portrait of
himself. Our actions write our autobiography which is, of course, a
fiction. But this fiction is necessary. The success or failure of our
lives depends on the way we draw our imaginary portrait. In other
words, they depend on how we succeed in making our existence a work of
art.
Before approaching psychoanalysis, I shall say a word about a new
school of experimental psychology which is arousing interest at
present in America. It cannot be neglected because of the light which
it throws on the contemporary novel. It is called Behaviorism--the
science of action or conduct. This system is based on the theory of
stimulants and reactions or response. It takes back to empiricism and
to psychophysics (mind-and-body relationship). It makes a clear sweep
of our mental life, conscious or subconscious, and consents to know the
Self only through its relations and reactions to the exterior world.
Behaviorism appears in the form of a vast inquest, a sort of referendum
on the possible motives of human actions. It replaces the interior
observation of classical psychology and the Freudian divination by a
peculiar Socratic-like examination, a tight network of questions which
claim to capture in their meshes the secrets of the Self. Here are a
few examples of this method of investigation. They resemble strongly a
catechism,--what we call in college slang a “quiz.”
This is the questionnaire proposed to diagnose the general emotional
aptitude of a subject.
Does the subject manifest a normal amount of curiosity? Has he
initiative? What are his particular inclinations and hobbies? What is
the history of his sexual initiations; of his liaisons, etc? Are his
emotional reactions well balanced?
To diagnose the disposition towards activity, the questionnaire is
modified as follows. Is the individual lazy or industrious? Is he
loquacious? Is he given to frequent laughter and to loud conversation?
Are his movements effectual or awkward?
For social fitness the following questions are asked:
How many intimate friends has the individual? What is the history of
his family relations? How easily does he form friendships? How much
loyalty has he? How much tact? Is his society sought by others?
This is the method of behavioristic investigation. It appears very
summary. Its critics accuse it, not without reason, of letting escape,
through the gaps in its questions, that which is most worth knowing.
Do not the answers to the questions of the behavioristic catechism
consider already discovered the secret which one expects to obtain
from them, so that all this display of questions is only a _petitio
principii_?
The attempt of behaviorism to construct our personality from without
and to wring from us, by our acts, the secret of our thoughts is,
however, interesting. It will help us to understand better the
psychological realism and the reporting methods of Theodore Dreiser,
for example. We shall bear it in mind for that reason.
* * * * *
I come now to psychoanalysis which is decidedly more attractive.
Psychoanalysis bases its investigations and its definitions on
the duplicity and hypocrisy inherent in individual and social
life. It shows us a psychic world of several degrees; at the top
and at the surface, the conscious universe: underneath, a sort of
semi-darkness--the preconscious; still lower, the unconscious.
Between these spheres the psychoanalyst pictures a moving, a
passing, a continuous rising and descending of expression and
repression, of desires and inhibitions. Between each compartment
he places antechambers, thresholds, turnstiles, wickets, censors,
a perfect clearing house, a central station for the receiving and
sorting of the events of our mental life. There seems to exist a
fore-established harmony between such a representation of conscious
facts and Puritanism; a harmony which has not escaped the critics
of psychoanalysis. According to a critic, “The comparative vogue
(Why _comparative_? Should not one say _excessive_?) of Freudism in
English-speaking countries is partly due to Protestant Puritanism.
The narrow restrictions which Puritan ethics impose upon sexual
satisfactions and the mystery in which they seek to envelop them would
prove, in the eyes of the English and American psychiatrists, certain
hypotheses of Freud and the supposed effect of Anglo-Saxon inhibitions
upon the production of neurosis.”[11]
Freud gives us through his doctrine of complexes, inhibitions,
suppressions and repressions, a striking explanation of Puritanism as I
tried to describe it in the first chapter. He makes us understand very
well the causes of floating anxiety and soul-fear which psychically
characterize the Puritan. Suppression and censorship are certainly the
key to Hawthorne’s Puritan portraits which I shall present shortly.
The important rôle and the analytical descriptions given to sexual
obsession in such Dreiser novels as “The Genius” fit in perfectly
with the Freudian therapeutics, and the methods of Freud’s divination
resemble greatly the main phases of the novel as Sherwood Anderson
conceives it: seclusion, insinuation, confession, day dreams, dream
symbolism, secret symbolic language, all with a basis of pronounced
sexual obsession. Fiction and psychoanalysis agree perfectly in all
this.
We must not forget the disquieting elements of Freudism, the manner in
which it reintroduces into the idea of Self the elementary, primitive,
crude and purely instinctive constituents. There are, on this point,
curious affinities between the “call of the wild” as understood by
Freud and by Jack London, for example. The Anglo-Saxon is, despite his
Puritanism, nearer true nature than the Latin, we are told. He is more
primitive, more elementary. The psychoanalyst would undoubtedly confirm
these views and this new manner of completing the portrait of the
Puritan.
* * * * *
After this introduction, of which, I hope, the readers will feel the
pertinence in the following chapters, I should like, still from the
point of view of psychological research and its influence on the
American novel of to-day, to study certain aspects, which I consider
very modern, of the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is a great artist
and an armed psychologist, an able story-teller and, one might say,
the detective of the Puritan conscience. He is, in many respects,
very Freudian; what attracts him, from the moment he starts writing,
is the inmost life, the enigma in the depths of the conscience. He
feels that the world of appearances is false; that, being false, it
is tragic; that the human being is twofold; that under the outward
Self, the superimposed Self, is hidden a profounder, timid being or,
as one says to-day, repressed. Instead of denouncing moral duplicity,
like Carlyle or Mark Twain, Hawthorne transforms it into art. He loves
enigmas, mysteries, obscurity, secret retreats. He is the explorer of
the subterranean world, the Conan Doyle of the conscience. In that,
Hawthorne is assuredly a compatriot of Edgar Allan Poe.
He lived a narrow existence in a monotonous and dismal New England
town, but one filled with dreams and memories. Solitude and disillusion
were his daily bread. His political ambitions were not fulfilled. He
secluded himself in Concord, in the unfriendly neighborhood of Emerson,
another repressed individual like himself. Heredity weighed heavily
upon him. There is no doubt that one must look into his genealogy for
the secret of his obsessions. All his life, Hawthorne was haunted by
the idea of crime, by the thought of the Inquisition, by dungeons and
tortures. Is not the crime which, in his “Marble Faun,” Donatello
commits because of the averted glance of the unfortunate Miriam, an
unconscious memory of that tragic duel suggested, we are told, to his
friend Cilley, by an involuntary gesture of Hawthorne? Nor could he
forget that one of his ancestors had been a witch burner. All that
explains Hawthorne’s complex, the vague sense of disquietude and the
mental fear which charge the atmosphere of his novels.
One must note however, this said, that there is much more than a
tragic and lugubrious conception of existence in Hawthorne’s books.
The favorite and latent theme of his novels is paganism and the joy of
living, the love of love, the delight in voluptuousness. His characters
would willingly abandon themselves to it if the Evil One did not
prowl so near in the forest, and if the deacon, the alderman and the
constable did not lend a helping hand. It is impossible to be mistaken;
Hawthorne’s imagination was pagan. The two protagonists of “The
Scarlet Letter,” considered his most puritanical book, are thoroughly
immoral. They begin in anguish through the suppression of their desires
and end in happiness through their abandonment to the freed libido.
All of “The Marble Faun”--subject, characters and descriptions--is a
plea for natural and instinctive expansion, a pagan plea. Donatello is
an inspired symbol of this naturalistic conception of life. Donatello
is the Faun, the beast become man, the man of nature, by definition
good and happy until the awakening of his conscience. Hester Prynne,
Miriam and Zenobia of “The Blithedale Romance” are seductive women,
drawn without the slightest touch of hypocrisy or hesitation. Hawthorne
is very susceptible to the qualities of the feminine mind. He has
very sure, very penetrating, very profound intuitions about women, as
his portraits of young girls show--like little Pearl in “The Scarlet
Letter,” Phœbe in “The House of Seven Gables,” Hilda in “The Marble
Faun,” Priscilla in “The Blithedale Romance.” He makes them very naïve,
very sincere, in order, it would seem, to terrify them more by the
discovery of evil, the knowledge of which is brought to them through
the intermediation of one of their elders,--mother, sister or friend.
* * * * *
This man, who aspired so keenly to the joy of living, had a conscience
profoundly sensitive to evil. It is the susceptibility of check, the
Puritan repression of desire. We have no need to recall with what
inflexibility, what morbid obstinacy Hawthorne discussed the problem of
evil. Dostoievski was not more tragically, more persistently haunted by
the idea of crime and punishment than he. “The House of Seven Gables”
might just as well have been entitled “The House of Crime.” It is
composed upon the theme that one does not escape a sin committed; that
a misdeed is fatal in its results; that there is no redemption for
the sinner. There is only immanent justice, as Emerson said, “eternal
return”; according to Nietzsche, Fate, the authentic incarnation of the
Calvinist predestination. It is not the act itself which constitutes
sin, according to Hawthorne; it is the thought, the intention, and,
as there is not a single human being who has not sheltered some
criminal thought during the course of his life, it follows that we
are all criminals. That is what Hawthorne repeated to satiety and
what he wanted to prove in his books. But he went still farther, in a
direction in which his Puritanism, because of its harshness, becomes
sheer amorality. We think of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” when we
read the numerous passages in which Hawthorne sustains the necessity
of evil and consequently of crime. He does not hide it, for example,
in connection with the two leading characters of “The Scarlet Letter.”
He tells us that Reverend Dimmesdale’s remorse was “exquisite” as well
as horrible. In “The Marble Faun” Donatello must commit a crime before
Miriam will love him and utter that stupendous cry, “How beautiful
he is!” Miriam holds that crime has lifted her poor Faun to a level
superior to innocence; that Adam’s sin, repeated by Donatello, has
brought his posterity to a higher, brighter level of happiness. It is
remorse, Miriam tells us, which has awakened and developed in the Faun
a thousand moral and intellectual faculties unknown till then. These
are some of the moral paradoxes of the “Puritan” Hawthorne.
However interesting he may be as a moralist, he is still more so as a
psychologist. His moral sense was not without effect here. He is one
of the few American authors whose ethics are supported by the problem
of evil; he was led to explore the conscience and his diagnoses are
striking. They are in many respects very modern, as I shall try to show
from “The Scarlet Letter.”
Critics and readers have often mistaken the true significance of
this book. It is vaunted as a masterpiece of story-telling, and a
masterpiece it is in its main lines, despite some awkwardness in the
development of the action, and if it is not judged too severely for
repetitions which mar especially the last part of the book. The great
mistake would consist in interpreting “The Scarlet Letter” as a plea
for Puritanism. It is, in my opinion, quite the contrary. Very few
critics have grasped the real viewpoint from which Hawthorne conceived
the characters of Hester Prynne and Dimmesdale. (Excepting D. H.
Lawrence, in a chapter of his imaginative but penetrating “Studies in
Classic American Literature.”)[12]
I do not wish to introduce Doctor Freud everywhere, nor do I want to
exaggerate Hawthorne’s immoralism, but if there has ever been a piece
of literature written to prove the dangers of the famous Freudian
inhibition and to try to cure it, that work is certainly “The Scarlet
Letter.”
The wealth of psychological intuition in this novel is remarkable.
It is the most human, the least moralizing (I was about to say the
most personal of Hawthorne’s novels), excepting of course the ending,
edifying and conventional as could be desired, but which is neither
better nor worse than all Hawthorne’s endings. We will remember the
tragic story of Hester Prynne, the beautiful Puritan seduced by the
Reverend Dimmesdale. Hester gave everything to love. She was put in the
stocks and condemned to wear embroidered on her blouse the letter A
(adultery), an ignominious insignia which her heroic coquetry succeeded
in converting into a bit of finery. Note well--Hester Prynne has no
shame, no remorse for her sin. She is proud of it. The world has
condemned her but she does not cease to love, no matter how cowardly
Dimmesdale behaves. From the beginning to the very end of the book,
Hester Prynne saw love only. If this is not the last word as it would
probably be on the screen of the “movies,” especially the American
“movies,” it is not far from being so and is the fault of neither
Hester Prynne nor Dimmesdale but of Hawthorne himself, grown, as often
happens with him, too timorous at the end of the book. Hawthorne is
very canny in attributing to the Puritan Hester a rich, a voluptuous
and almost “oriental” temperament. There does not exist, to my
knowledge, even in Zola’s famous description of the Paradou (in “La
Faute de l’abbé Mouret”) a more impetuous and eloquent burst of passion
than the ending of “The Scarlet Letter,” particularly the scene in the
forest between the spirited Hester and the timid Dimmesdale whom she
rescues from his hysterical inhibitions by her impassioned declarations.
An example of Hawthorne’s psychological realism, still more
characteristic than this case of Freudian evasion so exactly described,
is the method which he used to wring from Hester’s lover his secret.
Dimmesdale’s character is a masterpiece of intuition. He is a hypocrite
but only through timidity, and in all, a tragic and pathetic figure,
one of those weak and incomplete beings who have not even the courage
to lie. Hawthorne dealt several times, and very successfully, with
the study of warped or incompletely developed personalities. Clyfford
Pyncheon in “The House of the Seven Gables,” and Donatello in “The
Marble Faun,” are examples, and one might add to these the young
women--so numerous in his novels--emotionally distressed in the face of
evil. A victim, like Hester, of social conventions, but less courageous
than she, less sure of himself in passion, Dimmesdale lacks very
little to become the American Tartuffe. But he is saved by Hester,
who exorcises him at the end, and rescues him from repression. The
minister’s open confession on the pillory is an admirable scene. It
has its counterpart in “The Marble Faun” in which the candid Hilda,
unable to bear any longer the secret of the crime of which she was
an involuntary witness, enters a confessional at St. Peter’s and,
regardless of her Puritan heritage, reveals everything to a priest.
Dimmesdale’s puritanical confession on the pillory is of the same
nature. It is an explosion of craving and of repressed passion. From
the viewpoint of modern psychology this scene is natural and scientific.
But the most striking is the fashion in which Hawthorne endeavors
to surprise Dimmesdale’s secret. For that purpose he invented a
very curious secondary character, Doctor Chillingworth. He is in
many respects a melodramatic villain worthy of a serial by Eugene
Süe. He is Hester Prynne’s deceived husband. Once acquainted with
Chillingworth, we become very indulgent of poor Hester’s sin. More than
half necromancer, Chillingworth passed a large part of his life among
the Indians, who taught him their magic; that is the fantastic side of
his character. From the psychological point of view Chillingworth is
Suppressed Hatred. The readers of “The Scarlet Letter” will remember
the diabolic plan for vengeance formed by the necromancer-doctor who
suspects Dimmesdale of having been his wife’s lover. Little by little
he attaches himself to the unfortunate minister under the cover of
friendship. He tortures him by besieging him with insidious questions.
During the course of these searching examinations, Hawthorne shows
himself again a very subtle psychologist and a precursor and pioneer
of psychoanalysis. All the conditions in these scenes are so worked
out that Dimmesdale’s resistance takes on a truly Freudian aspect.
Dimmesdale will release his secret for no consideration. In fact, to
the very end, Chillingworth gets no further for all his trouble, but
the cross-examination to which he subjects the Reverend is curious, and
Dimmesdale has a narrow escape.
Here are, for example, a few remarks made by the novelist himself on
these examinations:
A man burdened with a secret should especially avoid the intimacy
of his physician. If the latter possess native sagacity, and a
nameless something more, let us call it intuition; if he show no
intrusive egotism, nor disagreeably prominent characteristics of
his own; if he have the power, which must be born with him, to
bring his mind into such affinity with his patient’s that this
last shall unawares have spoken what he imagines himself only to
have thought; if such revelations be received without tumult, and
acknowledged not so often by silence, an inarticulate breath, and
here and there a word, to indicate that all is understood; if
to these qualifications of a confidant be joined the advantages
afforded by his recognized character as a physician; then, at some
inevitable moment, will the soul of the sufferer be dissolved,
and flow forth in a dark but transparent stream, bringing all its
mysteries into the daylight.
Dimmesdale’s mind had become so familiar to Chillingworth that,
Hawthorne tells us, his whole “stream of consciousness,” as William
James would say, passed before the physician’s eyes.
Chillingworth became, in his researches, a true adept of Freud.
After having begun the study of Dimmesdale objectively, he ended by
becoming passionately absorbed in his case. Chillingworth experienced a
veritable fascination, we are told:
He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching
for gold; or rather like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in
quest of a jewel that had been buried on the dead man’s bosom, but
likely to find nothing save mortality and corruption.
It is again as a true disciple of Freud that Chillingworth scented
in his victim the hidden _libido_, which he calls a “strong animal
nature,” inherited from his father and mother. Here is another bit
of dialogue which is very modern in the same way. Chillingworth is
speaking,
“He to whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open knoweth
oftentimes but half the evil which he is called upon to cure.
A bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within
itself, may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the
spiritual part. Your pardon once again, good sir, if my speech give
the shadow of offence. You, sir, of all men whom I have known, are
he whose body is the closest conjoined and imbued and identified,
so to speak, with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.”
“Then I need ask no further;” said the clergyman, somewhat hastily
rising from his chair. “You deal not, I take it, in medicine for
the soul.”
Upon which Dimmesdale rebels. He will not unveil his soul to the doctor
of his body. To the suggestions of his enemy he opposes a curious and
optimistic philosophy concerning the discovery of secret thoughts. No
power, according to him, excepting the divine power, could force a
human being to betray his inmost self, whether with words, signs of
writing or emblems.
On Judgment Day it will be otherwise, but that day the reading of the
secret thoughts will be expiatory and, for that reason, not painful but
pleasant. According to Dimmesdale, who is fully aware of his condition,
there are two kinds of repressed individuals, the timid ones whose
weakness forbids confession, and the moralists, the fatalists--we
should say the “pragmatists”--who consider silence, hypocrisy, as
socially more salutary than avowal. Dimmesdale, from this point of
view, is, until his conversion in the forest and at the pillory, what
we should call to-day a complete simulator.
However Freudian these diagnoses may appear in form, they are hardly
so intentionally. The treatment to which Chillingworth submits his
patient is conceived to be a torture and not a cure; Chillingworth, an
able practitioner perhaps, is a very poor psychologist. Without in the
least suspecting it, he works against his own ends. He never suspects
that the day when Dimmesdale will reveal his secret to him will find
him not punished but relieved, and in reality cured, according to
Freud, and that he, Chillingworth, will have lost his time and pains
as a psychoanalyst. This is exactly what happens. Once freed from
repression and anxiety, Dimmesdale reveals himself to be a new man, a
man in the full sense of the word for the first time, and now he cares
neither for his fears nor for Chillingworth who has exploited them. The
true healer of Dimmesdale is not Chillingworth, it is Hester Prynne.
* * * * *
I have already told what admiration I hold for this ending of “The
Scarlet Letter.” Hawthorne reveals himself here to be not only a
profound psychologist and audacious moralist but a great poet. I want
to quote at length the scene in the forest where repressions and
inhibitions are drowned in “a flood of sunshine”:
Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame and
anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had not
known the weight until she felt the freedom! By another impulse
she took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and down it
fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and
a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to
her features. There played around her mouth and beamed out of her
eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very
heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that
had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness
of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past,
and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope and a happiness
before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if
the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these
two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as
with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring
a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf,
transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the
gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow
hitherto embodied the brightness now. The course of the little
brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart
of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.
Such was the sympathy of Nature--that wild, heathen Nature of the
forest, never subjugated by human law, nor illumined by higher
truth--with the bliss of these two spirits! Love, whether newly
born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create a
sunshine, filling the heart so full of radiance that it overflows
upon the outward world. Had the forest still kept its gloom it
would have been bright in Hester’s eyes and bright in Arthur
Dimmesdale’s.
This liberation of her passion made of Hester a different woman.
She had wandered, without rule or guidance, in a moral wilderness;
as vast, as intricate and shadowy, as the untamed forest, amid the
gloom of which they were now holding a colloquy that was to decide
their fate. Her intellect and heart had their home, as it were, in
desert places, where she roamed as freely as the wild Indian in
his woods. For years past she had looked from this estranged point
of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators
had established; criticising all with hardly more reverence than
the Indian would feel for the clerical band, the judicial robe, the
pillory, the gallows, the fireside, or the church.
Thus, insists Hawthorne, Hester’s misfortunes liberated her. The
scarlet letter (that is, if we judge her sin rightly) served her now
as a passport with which to penetrate into regions where women scarcely
dared go: “Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers--stern
and wild ones--and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.”
Dimmesdale, too, reaches the same result. The basis of his optimism
since Hester rescued him from his neuroses is amoral (should one say
immoral!) as that of the woman he loves:
His decision once made, a glow of strange enjoyment threw its
flickering brightness over the trouble of his breast. It was the
exhilarating effect--upon a prisoner just escaped from the dungeon
of his own heart--of breathing the wild, free atmosphere of an
unredeemed, unchristianized, lawless region.
At that moment Dimmesdale’s spirit “rose, as it were, with a bound, and
attained a nearer prospect of the sky, than throughout all the misery
which had kept him grovelling on the earth.”
It is with good reason that the minister, upon issuing from the forest
hurled a defy at his former parishioners:
I am not the man for whom you take me. I left him yonder in the
forest, withdrawn into a secret dell, by a mossy tree trunk and
near a melancholy brook! Go, seek your minister, and see if his
emaciated figure, his thin cheek, his white, heavy, pain-wrinkled
brow, be not flung down there, like a cast-off garment.
The transformation, the conversion of Dimmesdale freed from repression,
is complete. It overthrows his whole philosophy of life. It makes of
him an amoralist and a Nietzschean. Listen to Hawthorne:
Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home his inner man gave him other
evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In
truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code
in that interior kingdom was adequate to account for the impulses
now communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At
every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing
or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and
intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder
self than that which opposed the impulse.
Such I believe to be the basic meaning of this masterpiece, spoiled
again, unfortunately, by an edifying ending. Hawthorne was one of the
novelists best acquainted with man’s conscience.
Less fecund than many, he had the wisdom and talent to concentrate his
genius and thought upon the study of a preëminently human problem, that
of evil and responsibility. Besides the genius of intuition he had that
of symbolism. This realistic psychologist was a marvelous imagist. He
himself has given us a striking formula of his art. Art, according to
him, is the light of thought and imagination shining through what he
called “the opaque substance of days.” Like Emerson, he considered
wonder as an essential human faculty. Intuitive sympathy alone, he
believed, could solve the mysteries of existence. To come to truth one
must possess the innocent and naïve insight of a child.
For the purpose of knowing better the external world, Hawthorne loved
to look at it through the symbols which his prolific imagination
presented to him. One may even find that he carried symbolization
to excess. Two of his novels, in particular “The House of the Seven
Gables” and “The Marble Faun,” are, in certain regards, veritable
allegories. He found everywhere affinities between man and things. He
gave a soul to inanimate objects and made of them a tangible extension
of our personality. In “The House of the Seven Gables,” everything,
from the cellar to the garret, even the chicken yard and the well, is
so imagined as to give us the impression of the curse which weighs on
the old abode. In its antique frame “The Marble Faun” is conceived in
the same manner. Portraits which are alive, human faces which seem
to reincarnate pictures and statues, the strange resemblance, for
instance, between Miriam in “The Marble Faun” and the portrait of
Beatrice Cenci, or the statue of Cleopatra, mirrors in whose depth
float ghost faces, mysteries of dusk and shadow, mysteries of human
voices--the symbolism of Hawthorne is as rich as that of Edgar Poe and
adds another charm to his novels.