Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 18 of 46 (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 18 of 46

It is the story as old as the custom of marriage, - the story of the husband, the wife, and the lover; but bathed in a misty, moon shiny light, and completely neglecting the usual sources of emotion. The wife, with the charming child of her guilt, has stood under the stern inquisitorial law in the public pillory of the adulteress; while the lover, a saintly young minister, undetected and unbetrayed, has in an anguish of pusillanimity suffered her to pay the whole fine. The husband, an ancient scholar, a man of abstruse and profane learning, finds his revenge years after the wrong, in making himself insidiously the intimate of the young minister, and feeding secretly on the remorse, the inward torments, which he does everything to quicken but pretends to have no ground for suspecting. The march of the drama lies almost wholly in the malignant pressure exercised in this manner by Chillingworth upon Dimmesdale; an influence that at last reaches its climax in the extraordinary penance of the sub ject, who in the darkness, in the sleeping town, mounts, himself, upon the scaffold on which, years before, the partner of his guilt has undergone irrevocable anguish. In this situation he calls to him Hester Prynne and her child, who, belated in the course of the merci ful ministrations to which Hester has now given herself up, pass, among the shadows, within sight of him; and they in response to his appeal ascend for a second time to the place of atonement, and stand there with him under cover of night. The scene is not com plete, of course, till Chillingworth arrives to enjoy the spectacle and his triumph. It has inevitably gained great praise. And no page of Hawthorne's Shows more intensity of imagination; yet the main achievement of the book is not what is principally its subject, - the picture of the relation of the two men. They are too faintly - the husband in particular - though so fancifully figured. 'the Scarlet Letter' lives, in spite of too many cold cancettz', - Hawthorne's general danger, - by something noble and truthful in the image of the branded mother and the beautiful child. Strangely enough, this pair are almost wholly outside the action; yet they preserve and vivify the work.

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