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
Hester, in the wood, he suffers the most freakish temptations to various
blasphemy on returning to the town: he meets a deacon, and desires to
utter evil suggestions concerning the communion-supper; then a pious and
exemplary old dame, fortunately deaf, into whose ear a mad impulse urges
him to whisper what then seemed to him an "unanswerable argument against
the immortality of the soul," and after muttering some incoherent words,
he sees "an expression of divine gratitude and ecstasy that seemed like
the _shine of the celestial city_ on her face.
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