How
different from Shelley's use of the theme! There is certainly nothing in
the "Marble Faun" to equal the impassioned expression of wrong, and the
piercing outcry against the shallow but awful errors of human justice,
which uplift Shelley's drama. But Shelley stops, on the one side, with
this climax:--
"O plead
With famine or wind-walking pestilence,
Blind lightning or the deaf sea, not with man!"
And on the side of the moral question, he leaves us with Beatrice's
characterization of the parricide,
"Which is, or is not, what men call a crime."
Hawthorne, on the contrary, starts from this latter doubt. "The foremost
result of a broken law," he says, "is ever an ecstatic freedom." But
instead of pausing to give this his whole weight, as Shelley does, he
distinctly pronounces the murder of Miriam's degraded father to be
crime, and proceeds to inquire how Miriam and Donatello may work out
their purification. So that if the first part of the romance is the Fall
of Man repeated, the second part is the proem to a new Paradise
Regained; and the seclusion of the sculptor and the Faun, and their
journey together to Perugia, seasoned with Kenyon's noble and
pure-hearted advice, compose a sort of seven-times-refined Pilgrim's
Progress. Apt culmination of a genius whose relations to Milton and
Bunyan we found to be so suggestive! The chief means which Kenyon offers
for regeneration is that Miriam and the Faun shall abandon any hope of
mutual joy, and consecrate themselves to the alleviation of misery in
the world.
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