The
well-defined opposition between good and bad forces has always been a
necessity to man, in myths, religions, and drama. Heal life furnishes
the most absolute extremes of possession by the angel or the fiend; and
Shakespere has not scrupled to use one of these ultimate possibilities
in the person of Iago. Yet Hawthorne was too acutely conscious of the
downward bent in every heart, to let the Judge's pronounced iniquity
stand without giving a glimpse of incipient evil in another quarter.
This occurs in the temptation which besets Holgrave, when he finds that
he possesses the same mesmeric sway over Phoebe, the latest Pyncheon
offshoot, as that which his ancestor Matthew Maule exercised over Alice
Pyncheon. The momentary mood which brings before him the absolute power
which might be his over this fair girl, opens a whole new vista of
wrong, in which the retribution would have been transferred from the
shoulders of the Pyncheons to those of the Maules. Had Holgrave yielded
then, he might have damned his own posterity, as Colonel Pyncheon had
_his_. Thus, even in the hero of the piece, we are made aware of
possibilities as malicious and destructive as those hereditary faults
grown to such rank maturity in the Judge; and this may be said to offer
a middle ground between the side of justice and attractiveness, and the
side of injustice and repulsiveness, on which the personages are
respectively ranged.
The conception of a misdeed operating through several generations, and
righted at last solely by the over-toppling of unrestrained malevolence
on the one hand, and on the other by the force of upright character in
the wronged family, was a novel one at the time; this graphic depicture
of the past at work upon the present has anticipated a great deal of the
history and criticism of the following twenty-five years, in its close
conjunction of antecedent influences and cumulative effects.
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