He
confesses to himself that "there is evil in every human heart, which may
remain latent, perhaps, through the whole of life; but circumstances may
rouse it to activity." It is not a new discovery; but from the force
with which it strikes him, we may guess the strength of his aspiration,
the fine temper of his faith in the good and the beautiful. To be driven
to this dismal conclusion is for him a source of inexpressible dismay,
because he had trusted so deeply in the possibility of reaching some
brighter truth. No; not a new discovery;--but one who approaches it with
so much sensibility _feels_ it to be new, with all the fervor which
the most absolute novelty could rouse. This is the deepest and the true
originality, to possess such intensity of feeling that the oldest truth,
when approached by our own methods, shall be full of a primitive
impressiveness.
But, in the midst of the depression born of his immense sorrow over sin,
Hawthorne found compensations. First, in the query which he puts so
briefly: "The good deeds in an evil life,--the generous, noble, and
excellent actions done by people habitually wicked,--to ask what is to
become of them." This is the motive which has furnished novelists for
the last half-century with their most stirring and pathetic effects. It
is a sort of escape, a safety-valve for the hot fire of controversy on
the soul's fate, and offers in its pertinent indefiniteness a vast
solace to those who are trying to balance the bewildering account of
virtue with sin.
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