character is more twisted and tortuous than hers, and to understand him we must visit him apart.  The sensitive nature that can endure physical pain but shrinks piteously from moral torture, the capacity for deep and passionate feeling, the strange blending of pride and abject self-loathing, of cowardice and resolve, are portrayed with extraordinary skill.  The different strands of his character are “intertwined in an inextricable knot.”  His is a living soul, complicated and varying in its moods, but ever pursued by a sense of sin.  By one of Hawthorne’s swift, uncanny flashes of insight, as Dimmesdale goes home after the forest-meeting, we hear nothing of the wild beatings of hope and dreary revulsions to despair, but only of foul, grotesque temptations that assail him, just as earlier—­on the pillory—­it is the grim humour and not the frightful shame of the situation that strikes him, when by an odd trick of his imagination he suddenly pictures a “whole tribe of decorous personages starting into view with the disorder of a nightmare in their aspects,” to look upon their minister.

Hawthorne’s delineation of character and motive is as scrupulously accurate and scientific as Godwin’s, but there is none of Godwin’s inhumanity in his attitude.  His complete understanding of human weakness makes pity superfluous and undignified.  He pronounces no judgment and offers no plea for mercy.  His instinct is to present the story as it appeared through the eyes of those who enacted the drama or who witnessed it.  Stern and inexorable as one of his own witch-judging ancestors, Hawthorne foils the lovers’ plan of escape across the sea, lets the minister die as soon as he has made the revelation that gives him his one moment of victory, and in the conclusion brings Hester back to take up her long-forsaken symbol of shame.  Pearl alone Hawthorne sets free, the spell which bound her human sympathies broken by the kiss she bestows on her guilty father.  There are few passionate outbursts of feeling, save when Hester momentarily unlocks her heart in the forest—­and even here Hawthorne’s language is extraordinarily restrained: 

“’What we did had a consecration of its own.  We felt it so!  We said so to each other.  Hast thou forgotten it?’ ‘Hush, Hester!’ said Arthur Dimmesdale, rising from the ground.  ‘No; I have not forgotten.’”

Or again, after Dimmesdale has confessed that he has neither strength nor courage left him to venture into the world:  “’Thou shalt not go alone!’ answered she, in a deep whisper.  Then all was spoken.”

In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), as in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne again presents his scenes in the light of a single, pervading idea, this time an ancestral curse, symbolised by the portrait of Colonel Pyncheon, who condemned an innocent man for witchcraft.