ART. III.-The Scarlet Letter - A Romance. By NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. Boston. Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. 1850.

No author of our own country, and scarcely any author of our times, manages to keep himself clothed in such a cloak of mystery as Nathaniel Hawthorne. From the time when his "Twice-Told Tales" went, in their first telling, floating through the periodicals of the day, up to the appearance of" The Scarlet Letter," he has stood on the confines of society, as we see some sombre figure, in the dim light of the stage scenery, peering through that narrow space, when a slouched hat and a muffling cloak do not meet, upon the tragic events which are made conspicuous by the glare of the footlights. From nowhere in particular, from an old manse, and from the drowsy dilapidation of an old custom-house, he has spoken such oracular words, such searching thoughts, as sounded of old from the mystic God whose face was never seen even by the most worthy. It seems useless now to speak of his humor, subtile and delicate as Charles Lamb's; of his pathos, deep as Richter's; of his penetration into the human heart, clearer than that of Goldsmith or Crabbe; of his apt and telling words, which Pope might have envied; of his description, graphic as Scott's or Dickens's; of the delicious lanes he opens, on either hand, and leaves you alone to explore, masking his work with the fine "faciebat" which removes all limit from all high art, and gives every man scope to advance and develop. He seems never to trouble himself, either in writing or living, with the surroundings of life. He is no philosopher for the poor or the rich, for the ignorant or the learned, for the righteous or the wicked, for any special rank or condition in life, but for human nature as given by God into the hands of man. He calls us to be indignant witnesses of no particular social, religious, or political enormity. He asks no admiration for this or that individual or associated virtue. The face of society, with its manifold features, never comes before you, as you study the extraordinary experience of his men and women, except as a necessary setting for the picture. They might shine at tournaments, or grovel in cellars, or love, or fight, or meet with high adventure, or live the deepest and quietest life in unknown corners of the earth, their actual all vanishes before the strange and shifting picture he gives of the motive heart of man. In no

work of his is this characteristic more strikingly visible than in "The Scarlet Letter;" and in no work has he presented so clear and perfect an image of himself, as a speculative philosopher, an ethical thinker, a living man. Perhaps he verges strongly upon the supernatural, in the minds of those who would recognize nothing but the corporeal existence of human life. But man's nature is, by birth, supernatural; and the deep mystery which lies beneath all his actions is far beyond. the reach of any mystical vision that ever lent its airy shape to the creations of the most intense dreamer.

When he roamed at large, we cared not to attribute any of his wisdom to his mode of life. When he hailed from an old manse, "living," as he says, " for three years within the subtile influence of an intellect like Emerson's, indulging fantastic speculations beside the fire of fallen boughs with Ellery Channing, talking with Thoreau about pine trees and Indian relics, in his hermitage at Walden, growing fastidious by sympathy with the classic refinement of Hillard's culture, becoming imbued with poetic sentiment at Longfellow's hearth-stone," we seem ready to receive him as the fruit of such culture. When he descended, as he would have us believe, into the realms of the actual, and acted his part among practical men, we were not so ready as he was, himself, to submit to his burial, but waited for the next words which should fall from his lips. And we were obliged to wait until the breeze which bore his commission to his feet retired, and swept away the honors and emoluments to cast them before some other willing recipient. And now he comes before us, not only the deep and wonderful thinker, the man of intense life we have always known, but in the new attitude of an office-holder, and, in this guise, gives us his dictum.

One word upon this matter, contained in the " Introduction " of the book. However singular he may be in other respects, his opinion of office-holding appears to be in common with that of the "rest of mankind "the possessors of place always excepted. The mental paralysis which attended his own experience in this mode of life, which grows out of leaning on "the mighty arm of the Republic," which comes of feeding on the pap of government, and remains after the food is removed, is, unquestionably, the disease which is peculiar to this locality of the business world. As pettifogging from law, quackery from medicine, bigotry and dogmatism from divinity, eagerness and avarice from the business of the counting-house

and the market, uncompromising hate and bitterness from reform, callousness, in a word, from all the practical detail and manipulation of life, so come subserviency and want of self-reli ance from office-holding. No more, and no less. It is a painful fact that every way of life, whose tendency is to a practical result, becomes hard, bare, dusty, and ignoble from constant travel. Though many men resist this effect, all men feel it; and that power which makes a man an open-minded, sagacious jurist, a kind and honest physician, a liberal divine, a generous business-man, a gentle and charitable reformer, sustains some in the duties of office conferred by party, giving dignity and respectability to their place, and opportunity and experience to themselves. There is an energy which no circumstance can destroy, which belongs to that subtile and defiant essence called character. Life has two results the development of the strong, and the destruction of the weak; and it is to the latter, alone, that the degradations of practical effort belong. If we run our eye over literary history, and see the intellectual fire which has been subjected to the quenching influences of patronage and place, from Chaucer to Hawthorne, we shall not condemn office-holding as wholly enervating. If we go from the custom-house into State Street, we shall find that office-holding is not the only mercenary sphere in the world. And if we wander out of the region of politics into the pulpit, we shall find that the former does not contain all the time-serving subserviency. To us who live under no rain of manna, the whole process of getting a living is hard enough at best. And he who can make this work secondary to the great life of thought, and a relaxation to his laboring mind, unites those powers which carry man to his highest development.

Of Hawthorne as a worker, especially as an office-holder, we would not think or speak more than is necessary. He has presented himself in this light, and of course demands notice, as every extraordinary man does, whatever be his sphere of action. And even here, condemn the position as he may, we are glad to admire his peculiar genius. From the height of that tall office stool on which he sat, his survey of mankind. around him was clear, just, and penetrating. There is not a life whose daily history, sincerely and earnestly presented, does not appeal to our sympathy and interest. And we are reminded of the strong human groups of Teniers and Poussin, as we read the graphic picture of those old custom-house attachés from the pen of Hawthorne. His appreciation of

himself, and of each individual associate, whatever be his qualities, commands our unreserved assent. The general, the clerks, the inspectors, the "father of the custom-house," are real flesh and blood; and each acts his part in the drama with an interest and an effect which forbid his removal from the group. It is astonishing, how accurately he delineates the peculiar characteristics of his associates, how delicately and how justly. While we sit and listen with the intensity of sympathetic interest to the effect which each foot-worn stone in the court-yard, each grass-grown corner of the old neglected wharf, each incursion of busy merchants, and "sea-flushed " sailors, each rafter of that old building where the traditions were hung up to dry, each duty and interest has upon the mind and heart of this acute observer and delineator; we grow muscular, and peculiarly vital and stomachic, over the old evergreen inspector, we are vitalized account-books with the accurate clerk; we are half asleep with the snoring old seadogs, who range along the passage; and we are firm, immovable, placid, patriotic, brave, when we read the tender and touching recognition of the peculiar reverence due the calm and silent night which rests upon the great quenched mass of forces contained in the hoary old collector himself. The humor here is inimitable too. The high stool sustains a keen and quaint surveyor, in one instance at least; and, although some might question the delicacy of the personal allusions, we are forced to admire the twinkling good-nature, the honest confidence, the pathetic penetration, which play over that countenance as it takes its survey, and we know no such word as indelicacy as applicable to the result of that survey, for which we are as grateful as we are to Hogarth for his groups and faces. Although, to many minds, we doubt not a sense of spleen and vindictiveness may be imparted by the "Introductory," we should no sooner look for these passions from the high stool of the surveyor of the Salem custom-house, than from the desk of that clerk who carried, day after day for so many years, to his books in the India House, such wit and humor, such affection and touching devotion, such knowledge and gentleness, such purity of heart, and such elegant delicacy and power of mind.

But the office holder is guillotined, his official head drops off- presto- and Hawthorne, resuming his literary cranium, marches out of the custom-house, with the manuscript and Scarlet Letter of old Surveyor Pue, in his pocket. The

sale of the book has distributed the story-we would deal with its philosophy and merits. It is, as we had a right to expect, extraordinary, as a work of art, and as a vehicle of religion and ethics.

Surrounded by the stiff, formal dignitaries of our early New England Colony, and subjected to their severe laws, and severer social atmosphere, we have a picture of crime and passion. It would be hard to conceive of a greater outrage upon the freezing and self-denying doctrines of that day, than the sin for which Hester Prynne was damned by society, and for which Arthur Dimmesdale damned himself. For centuries, the devoted and superstitious Catholic had made it a part of his creed to cast disgrace upon the passions; and the cold and rigid Puritan, with less fervor, and consequently with less beauty, had driven them out of his paradise, as the parents of all sin. There was no recognition of the intention or meaning of that sensuous element of human nature which, gilding life like a burnishing sunset, lays the foundation of all that beauty which seeks its expression in poetry, and music, and art, and gives the highest apprehension of religious fervor. Zest of life was no part of the Puritan's belief. He scorned his own flesh and blood. His appetites were crimes. His cool head was always ready to temper the hot blood in its first tendency to come bounding from his heart. He had no sympathy, no tenderness, for any sinner, more especially for that hardened criminal who had failed to trample all his senses beneath his feet. Love, legalized, was a weakness in the mind of that mighty dogmatist, who, girt with the "sword of the Lord and of Gideon," subdued his enemies, and, with folios of texts and homilies, sustained and cheered his friends; and love, illegalized, was that burning, scarlet sin which had no forgiveness in these disciples of Him who said to the woman, "neither do I condemn thee." The state of society which this grizzly_ form of humanity created, probably served as little to purify men as any court of voluptuousness; and, while we recognize with compressed lip that heroism which braved seas and unknown shores, for opinion's sake, we remember, with a warm glow, the elegances and intrepid courage and tropical luxuriance of the cavaliers whom they left behind them. Asceticism and voluptuarism on either hand, neither fruitful of the finer and truer virtues, were all that men had arrived at in the great work of sensuous life.

It was the former which fixed the scarlet letter to the