The work has the tone of the circumstances in which it was produced.
If Hawthorne was in a sombre mood, and if his future was painfully
vague, _The Scarlet Letter_ contains little enough of gaiety or of
hopefulness. It is densely dark, with a single spot of vivid colour in
it; and it will probably long remain the most consistently gloomy of
English novels of the first order. But I just now called it the
author's masterpiece, and I imagine it will continue to be, for other
generations than ours, his most substantial title to fame. The
subject had probably lain a long time in his mind, as his subjects
were apt to do; so that he appears completely to possess it, to know
it and feel it. It is simpler and more complete than his other novels;
it achieves more perfectly what it attempts, and it has about it that
charm, very hard to express, which we find in an artist's work the
first time he has touched his highest mark--a sort of straightness and
naturalness of execution, an unconsciousness of his public, and
freshness of interest in his theme. It was a great success, and he
immediately found himself famous. The writer of these lines, who was a
child at the time, remembers dimly the sensation the book produced,
and the little shudder with which people alluded to it, as if a
peculiar horror were mixed with its attractions. He was too young to
read it himself, but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the
book lay upon the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief
indeed that the "letter" in question was one of the documents that
come by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him
that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue. Of course it was
difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester
Prynne's blood-coloured _A_. But the mystery was at last partly
dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the
annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered a
representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black dress and