Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

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20 THE COLLEGE RECORD. has surely been polluted by the flitting phantoms of iniquity — imaginity. Father Hooper says: When man does not vain- ly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin, then deem me a monster for the sym- bol beneath which I have lived and died. Hooked, and lo! every visage a Black veil! It seems to me there is no chasm nor any hideous emptiness under our feet except what the evil in us digs. It is a terrible thought that an individ- ual wrong doing melts us into the great mass of human crime and makes us who dreamed only of our own little separate sin — makes us guilty of the whole. These few quotations show how true Hawthorne was to his Puritan training, yet he had no love for his ancestors, much less for their religion as they taught it. It was with shame that he contemplated the cruelties perpetrated by them in the name of religion, and he thanked God heartily that every day removed him a little far- ther from his hard, unloving forefathers. He was the Puritan preacher from necessity not from choice, the unwilling repre- sentative of the seventeenth century in American literary art of the nineteenth. In the romances he has ample space in which to work over his problems in the varying but inevitable effects of sin; he sometimes only states his problem through the story, some- times does hardly more than suggest it, but he never works it out to a satisfactory result. He often seems as much baffled by the mysteries of sin as his reader is. In the Blithedale Romance, his cheeriest long story, we know that Zenobia's life has been shadowed by sin, though what the sin was, or what led to it, we are left to guess. In the Marble Faun some terrible crime has darkened the life of Miriam, yet here Haw- thorne but faintly suggests what the sin has been ; his real problem is not with the sin itself, but with the effects of sin — sin as a force in the soul development of the sinner. Haw- thorne fails to solve the problem because such problems can never be solved in this life. The scarlet letter, more than any of his other works, reveals Hawthorne the Puritan. The theme goes back in time to the old ny days, when Calvinism was strongest in its harsh, unloving, unforgiving ideals. As a hoy, and during his years of seclusion,

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THE COLLEGE RECORD. 19 it. He says in this connection : I have spent so much of my time alone that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of; and again: The Twice Told Tales have the tint of flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade. Instead of passion there is sentiment ; whether from lack of power or from an uncontrollable reserve, the author's touches have often an effect of tameness: the merriest man could hardly laugh at his broadest humor ; the tenderest woman will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos. All these sharp criticisms from his own pen are true because he feels his lack of sympa- thy with the real world which comes only from an intelligent contact with humanity. He says in a letter to Lonfellow at a time of bereavement : Trouble is the next best thing to en- joyment, and there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows. Hawthorne's Puritan traits are revealed again in his tenden- dency to spiritualize, often to humanize, everything he touched. To the Puritan the spirit life was the real life, and accordingly Hawthorne must penetrate the surface of all things, and find there ever the spiritual meaning. The things of the spirit and the mysteries thereof were his inherited world. Here he must work if anywhere; here he did work, but he would have fallen short of his inheritance if he had worked only as an artist. Hawthorne, though never a theo- logian, was always a preacher. With the highest art he tells his stories, and weaves into them the moral so skillfully that no exposition is needed to make the lesson clear. But Haw- thorne fears lest the moral escape his audience, so in a para- graph or two at the end of the story he expounds his moral in direct violation of art ; but this Violation of his art is so es- sential to his Puritan nature that we forgive him for imposing on our intelligence, and smile at the naive way in which the preacher reveals himself. Since Hawthorne was a soul student and a preacher from necessity, from necessity also he makes sin the prevailing theme of his romances, and of many of the tales. His Calvin- ism is prominent in the extracts that follow. In Fancy's Show Box he says: Man must not disclaim his brotherhood even with the guiltiest, since though his hands be clean, his heart

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THE COLLEGE RECORD. 21 Hawthorne had lived so much in the past that he knew the life of early Boston ; its people were even more familiar to him than those of his own home town. The view point for the favorite study here is secrecy. In Hester Prynne we watch the development of a soul that grows steadily strong as it works its life upward to the highest ideals possible after sin has once been admitted and publicly pun- ished ; in Dimsdale w e watch another soul developing downward under the influence of sin concealed from a trusting public. The result in Dimsdale's Puritan conscience is a remorse that eats away his very life in the course of the seven years of the story. Old Roger, to whose charge Hawthorne lays the greatest sin, is also touched by the sin of the romance, but in him revenge is the only result — revenge of the darkest nature. Not even the elf child Pearl, Hawthorne's fairest creation, escapes the evil influences. With consummate skill Hawthorne enters into the spirit of his story, and here, as nowhere else, he gives us a psycho logical study of his characters. With the hand of a master he keeps the theme ever before the reader. The scarlet letter blazes from every page, never for one moment allowing us to forget its presence. The book is all Puritanism, dark and gloomy ; only the wild rose at the prison door and the elf-like child relieve the sombre cast of the story, and even Pearl is so overshadowed by the sin of her exist- ence that she intensifies rather than relieves the gloom. The book is without joy in its religious suggestions ; Hester dares to believe that possibly in the life to come there may be happiness for them, but Dimsdale refers only to the broken law and says : Let this be alone in thy thoughts! fear, I fear! Hawthorne has been criti- cized for making the picture so dark, but he couldn't have done otherwise. The Puritanism of early Boston was dark, unlovely, and unforgiving, and Hawthorne would have been untrue to his art if he had made the story bright with suggestions of forgiveness and eternal happiness. When sin has been once admitted to a life, even as an incident and not as a habit, its evil influences can never be entirely overcome. Though the scarlet letter ceased, in after years, to be a cause of reproach, it was ever a type of something to be remembered with sorrow. Hester longed to be the proph- etess of a new truth that should place the world on saner and surer grounds of happiness, but she recognized the impossibility that any mission of divine and mysterious truth should be confided to a woman stained with sin, bowed down with shame, or even