But
they, as he has also said, require "to be read in the clear brown
twilight atmosphere in which they were written"; while the "Mosses" are
the work of a man who has learned to know the world, and the atmosphere
in which they were composed seems almost dissonant with the tone of some
of them. "The Birthmark," "The Bosom Serpent," "Rappaccini's Daughter,"
and that terrible and lurid parable of "Young Goodman Brown," are made
up of such horror as Hawthorne has seldom expressed elsewhere. "The
Procession of Life" is a fainter vibration of the same chord of
awfulness. Such concentration of frightful truth do these most graceful
and exquisitely wrought creations contain, that the intensity becomes
almost poisonous. What is the meaning of this added revelation of evil?
The genius of Hawthorne was one which used without stint that costliest
of all elements in production,--time; the brooding propensity was
indispensable to him; and, accordingly, as some of these conceptions had
occurred to him a good while before the carrying out, they received
great and almost excessive elaboration. The reality of sin, the
pervasiveness of evil, had been but slightly insisted upon in the
earlier tales: in this series, the idea bursts up like a long-buried
fire, with earth-shaking strength, and the pits of Hell seem yawning
beneath us. Dismal, too, is the story of "Roger Malvin's Burial," and
dreary "The Christmas Banquet," with its assembly of the supremely
wretched. In "Earth's Holocaust" we get the first result of Hawthorne's
insight into the demonianism of reformatory schemers who forget that the
centre of every true reform is the heart.
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