The London _Athenæum_, of the 15th June, has the following remarks
upon the last work of NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE:
"This is a most powerful and painful story. Mr. Hawthorne must be well
known to our readers as a favorite of the _Athenæum_. We rate him
as among the most original and peculiar writers of American fiction.
There in his works a mixture of Puritan reserve and wild imagination,
of passion and description, of the allegorical and the real, which
some will fail to understand, and which others will positively
reject,--but which, to ourselves, is fascinating, and which entitles
him to be placed on a level with Brockden Brown and the author of 'Rip
Van Winkle.' 'The Scarlet Letter' will increase his reputation with
all who do not shrink from the invention of the tale; but this, as
we have said, is more than ordinarily painful. When we have announced
that the three characters are a guilty wife, openly punished for her
guilt,--her tempter, whom she refuses to unmask, and who during the
entire story carries a fair front and an unblemished name among his
congregation,--and her husband, who, returning from a long absence at
the moment of her sentence, sits himself down betwixt the two in the
midst of a small and severe community to work out his slow vengeance
on both under the pretext of magnanimous forgiveness,--when we have
explained that 'The Scarlet Letter' is the badge of Hester Prynne's
shame, we ought to add that we recollect no tale dealing with crime
so sad and revenge so subtly diabolical, that is at the same time so
clear of fever and of prurient excitement. The misery of the woman
is as present in every page as the heading which in the title of
the romance symbolizes her punishment. Her terrors concerning her
strange elvish child present retribution in a form which is new and
natural:--her slow and painful purification through repentance is
crowned by no perfect happiness, such as awaits the decline of those
who have no dark and bitter past to remember. Then, the gradual
corrosion of heart of Dimmesdale, the faithless priest, under the
insidious care of the husband, (whose relationship to Hester is
a secret known only to themselves,) is appalling; and his final
confession and expiation are merely a relief, not a reconciliation.
We are by no means satisfied that passions and tragedies like these
are the legitimate subjects for fiction: we are satisfied that
novels such as 'Adam Blair,' and plays such as 'The Stranger,' maybe
justly charged with attracting more persons than they warn by their
excitement. But if Sin and Sorrow in their most fearful forms are to
be presented in any work of art, they have rarely been treated with
a loftier severity, purity, and sympathy than in Mr. Hawthorne's
'Scarlet Letter.' The touch of the fantastic befitting a period of
society in which ignorant and excitable human creatures conceived each
other and themselves to be under the direct 'rule and governance' of
the Wicked One, is most skillfully administered. The supernatural here
never becomes grossly palpable:--the thrill is all the deeper for its
action being indefinite, and its source vague and distant."
[Footnote 2: The Scarlet Letter: a Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Boston: Ticknor & Co.]
* * * * *
The Emperor Nicholas has just published an ordonnance, which regulates
the pensions to which Russian and foreign actors at the imperial
theaters at St. Petersburgh shall be entitled. This ordonnance divides
the actors (national as well as foreign) into four classes. The first
class obtains, after twenty years' service, pensions averaging from
300 to 1140 silver rubles. The others, after fifteen years' service,
will receive pensions from 285 to 750 silver rubles.
* * * * *