Devil." Where,
within the covers of the book, could the deluded man have found this
doctrine urged? Only once, faintly, and then in the words of one of the
chief sinners.
"Shelley himself," says the austere critic, airing his literature,
"never imagined a more dissolute conversation than that in which the
polluted minister comforts himself with the thought, that the revenge of
the injured husband is worse than his own sin in instigating it. 'Thou
and I never did so, Hester,' he suggests; and she responds, 'Never,
never! What we did had a consecration of its own.'"
And these wretched and distorted consolations of two erring and
condemned souls, the righteous Churchman, with not very commendable
taste, seizes upon as the moral of the book, leaving aside the terrible
retribution which overtakes and blasts them so soon after their vain
plan of flight and happiness. Not for a moment does Hawthorne defend
their excuses for themselves. Of Hester:--
"Shame, Despair, Solitude! These [he says] had been her teachers,--stern
and wild ones,--and they had made her strong, but taught her much
amiss."
And what she urges on behalf of herself and Dimmesdale must, of course,
by any pure-minded reader, be included among the errors thus taken into
her mind.
"The minister, on the other hand, had never gone through an experience
calculated to lead him beyond the scope of generally received laws;
although, in a single instance, he had so fearfully transgressed one of
the most sacred of them.
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