Nathaniel Hawthorne

Extract

The art of Hawthorne is the most beautiful thing; that has come out of America. Perhaps its fantastic quality of imagination, in which beauty kindles from word to word as colour will in tapestry or in the red glow against the dun background of a Yanina embroidery, picked out here and there with fragmentary touches of gold thread, is due to the fact that his sense of beauty was a changeling and had no father in American soil. His subject is the Puritan conscience, whose fine and rigid quality was reflected in a stern law, the first refuge of frigid men who had entered a strange continent with all the forces of nature arrayed against them. Transplanted into a soil unprepared for them, the pioneers, who had revolted from their original home, identified their foes without with their foes within, so that nature everywhere became the enemy, and life itself sinful. To have been born at all was the first sin to these Puritans,—who suffered from the most dreadful of all human superstitions, expiated by sacrifice. To them repentance meant wearing sackcloth and ashes. But there is an old word not open to this confusion, the word resipiscence. It means, as repentance should be held to mean, change to a better frame of mind. This they neglected. The means were confused with the end; punishment was enjoyed for its own sake, and suffering became a man-eating idol after the manner of Moloch.

What, then, could a sensitive and imaginative descendant of these Puritans do but play around the border of forbidden things,