the musician usually touches is the bass, when he intends to put all in
tune. God also plays upon this string first, when he sets the soul in
tune for himself. Only there was the imperfection of Mr. Fearing; he
could play upon no other music but this, till towards his latter end."
Let the reader by no means imagine a moral comparison between Hawthorne
and Bunyan's Mr. Fearing. The latter, as his creator says, "was a good
man, though much down in spirit"; and Hawthorne, eminent in uprightness,
was also overcast by a behest to look for the most part at the darker
phases of human thinking and feeling; yet there could not have been the
slightest real similarity between him and the excellent but weak-kneed
Mr. Fearing, whose life is made heavy by the doubt of his inheritance in
the next world. Still, though the causes differ, it could be said of
Hawthorne, as of Master Fearing, "Difficulties, lions, or Vanity Fair,
he feared not at all; it was only sin, death, and hell that were to him
a terror." I mean merely that Hawthorne may have found in this
character-sketch--Bunyan's most elaborate one, for the typical subject
of which he shows an evident fondness and leniency--something peculiarly
fascinating, which may not have been without its shaping influence for
him. But the intimate, affectionate, and lasting relation between
Bunyan's allegory and our romancer is something to be perfectly assured
of. The affinity at once suggests itself, and there are allusions in the
"Note-Books" and the works of Hawthorne which recall and sustain it. So
late as 1854, he notes that "an American would never understand the
passage in Bunyan about Christian and Hopeful going astray along a
by-path into the grounds of Giant Despair, from there being no stiles
and by-paths in our country." Rarely, too, as Hawthorne quotes from or
alludes to other authors, there is a reference to Bunyan in "The
Blithedale Romance," and several are found in "The Scarlet Letter": it
is in that romance that the most powerful suggestion of kinship between
the two imaginations occurs. After Mr. Dimmesdale's interview with