... Were such a man once more to fall, what plea
could be urged in extenuation of his crime? _None_; unless it avail
him somewhat, that he was broken down by long and exquisite suffering;
that his mind was darkened and confused by the very remorse which
harrowed it."
But that these partial excuses are futile, the writer goes on to show,
in this solemn declaration:--
"And be the stern and sad truth spoken, that the breach which guilt has
once made into the human soul is never, in this mortal state, repaired.
It may be watched and guarded.... But there is still the ruined wall,
and near it the stealthy tread of the foe that would win over again his
unforgotten triumph."
How Mr. Dimmesdale yielded to this stealthy foe is then described; but
it is also shown how Roger Chillingworth, the personified retribution of
the two sinners, fastens himself to them in all their movements, and
will be with them in any flight, however distant.
"'Hadst thou sought the whole earth over,' said he, looking darkly at
the clergyman, 'there was no one place so secret, no high place nor
lowly place, where thou couldst have escaped me.'"
And it was precisely because Hawthorne would leave no specious turn of
the hypocrisy of sin unrevealed, that he carried us through this
delusive mutual consolation of the guilty pair, and showed us their
empty hope, founded on wrong-doing, powdered to dust at the moment of
fulfilment.
But the reverend critic, by some dark and prurient affinity of his
imagination, saw nothing of the awful truths so clearly though briefly
expressed, and finally came to the conclusion that the moral of the
whole fiction was "that the Gospel has not set the relations of man and
woman where they should be, and that a new gospel is needed to supersede
the Seventh Commandment, and the bond of matrimony.
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