idea of America having produced a novel that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it. Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the very heart of New England.[1]
No commentator can fail to remark that the story of Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne begins where a seductive love-story hastens to end, with the bitterness of stolen waters and the unpalatableness of bread eaten in secret. Without one glance backward over the secret path that led to the jail door, we are invited to fix our attention upon the sombre drama of punishment, atonement, remorse. "To Hawthorne's imagination," says Henry James, "the fact that these two persons had loved each other too well was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed to him was the idea of their moral situation in the long years that follow. "This is probably to represent the case as more exclusively a matter of artistic interest than it was to Hawthorne, though not more so than it might have been to James. When, in the Inferno, Dante confronts a pair of lovers at a similar point in their progress, the first question he raises is how they fell into that predicament. Hawthorne would hardly have regarded either the answer or the curi-
- ↑ Hawthorne (in The English Men of Letters series), 1879, pp. 107–8.
