Mr. Great-Heart says of Mr. Fearing: "He desired much to be
alone; yet he always loved good talk, and often would get behind the
screen to hear it." (So Hawthorne screened himself behind his genial
reserve.) "He also loved much to see ancient things, and to be pondering
them in his mind." What follows is not so strictly analogous throughout.
Mr. Honest asks Great-Heart why so good a man as Fearing "should be all
his days so much in the dark." And he answers, "There are two sorts of
reasons for it. One is, the wise God will have it so: some must pipe,
and some must weep.... And for my part, I care not at all for that
profession which begins not in heaviness of mind. The first string that
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.
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