By an incomparable succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the
travail of their souls. In the greatest scene of all, that
between Hester and Arthur in the forest, the Puritan framework of
the story gives way beneath the weight of human passion, and we
seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution than was
actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But
though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless,
no mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the
impotence of all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of
the intense reality of spiritual things. "The law we broke," in
Dimmesdale's ghostly words, was a more subtle law than can be
graven on tables of stone and numbered as the Seventh
Commandment.

The legacy of guilt is likewise the theme of "The House of the
Seven Gables," which Hawthorne himself was inclined to think a
better book than "The Scarlet Letter." Certainly this story of
old Salem is impeccably written and its subtle handling of tone
and atmosphere is beyond dispute. An ancestral curse, the
visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the children, the
gradual decay of a once sound stock, are motives that Ibsen might
have developed. But the Norseman would have failed to rival
Hawthorne's delicate manipulation of his shadows, and the no less
masterly deftness of the ultimate mediation of a dark inheritance
through the love of the light-hearted Phoebe for the latest
descendant of the Maules. In "The Blithedale Romance" Hawthorne
stood for once, perhaps, too near his material to allow the rich
atmospheric effects which he prefers, and in spite of the
unforgetable portrait of Zenobia and powerful passages of
realistic description, the book is not quite focussed. In "The