Keuka College - Kiondaga Yearbook (Keuka Park, NY)

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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

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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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22 THE COLLEGE RECORD. burdened with a life-long sorrow. The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful ; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but through the ethereal medium of joy. Such was the scarlet letter with its symbolism, its gloom, and its lack of reality ; but in spite of its faults, the book is a master- piece— America's greatest contribution to the world of literary art. And the author ? He was an artist who could give to the word romance a new meaning in a country still in its infancy ; he was a student of nature and of the soul ; he was a man of simple life and simple faith, a man of sincerity, a man of conscience, a mystic, a philosopher — in short, he was Nathaniel Hawthorne, the Puritan. PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SCHOOLS. Carl Churchill. X A 7HILE this article was under consideration many let- V ters Were sent to the principals of schools, both public and private, in New York and other states. These letters carried inquiries about the particular schools with which these men were connected, and also invited opinions as to the advantages and disadvantages of both public and private schools. The most of the letters were fully an- swered, and have been of great service. In many cases the experience of the men. addressed has been wider and more valuable than that of the writer, and his own view has been broadened, and, in several cases, modified as a result of the inquiry. If there has come also a feeling of doubt as to his fitness for the task of discussing the subject, it has not strong enough to deter him from persevering in his original plan, for it is hoped that after all necessary deduc- tions for error have been made, there may remain enough of truth to be of service to those choosing schools for their own training or thai oi others. This was the object in view when | In- subjec t ns undertaken. A word about the schools considered may be appropriate. They were, for the most part, in New Vork State, and this may atfe t. i , some extent. the conclusions reached.