And, incidentally, this marks
out the way to "The Scarlet Letter" on the one hand, and "The Blithedale
Romance" on the other, in which the same theme assumes two widely
different phases. Thus we find the poet seeking more and more certainly
the central fountain of moral suggestion from which he drew his best
inspirations. The least pleasing quality of the work is, I think, its
overcharged allegorical burden. Some of the most perfect of all his
tales are here, but their very perfection makes one recoil the more at
the supremacy of their purely intellectual interest. One feels a certain
chagrin, too, on finishing them, as if the completeness of embodiment
had given the central idea a shade of too great obviousness. Hawthorne
is most enjoyable and most true to himself when he offers us the chalice
of poetry filled to the very brim with the clear liquid of moral truth.
But, at first, there seems to have been a conflict between his aesthetic
and his ethical impulse. Coleridge distinguishes the symbolical from the
allegorical, by calling it a part of some whole which it represents.
"Allegory cannot be other than spoken consciously; whereas in the symbol
it is very possible that the general truth represented may be working
unconsciously in the writer's mind.... The advantage of symbolical
writing over allegory is that it presumes no disjunction of faculties,
but simple predominance." Now in the "Allegories of the Heart,"
collected in the "Mosses," there is sometimes an extreme consciousness
of the idea to be illustrated; and though the ideas are in a measure
symbolical, yet they are on the whole too disintegrating in their effect
to leave the artistic result quite generous and satisfying.
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