ympathy with the torture of the
soul. We pity poor Mr. Dimmesdale profoundly, but we are also interested
in him as the subject of an experiment in analytical psychology. We do
not care so much for his emotions as for the strange phantoms which are
raised in his intellect by the disturbance of his natural functions. The
man is placed upon the rack, but our compassion is aroused, not by
feeling our own nerves and sinews twitching in sympathy, but by
remarking the strange confusion of ideas produced in his mind, the
singularly distorted aspect of things in general introduced by such an
experience, and hence, if we please, inferring the keenness of the pangs
which have produced them. This turn of thought explains the real meaning
of Hawthorne's antipathy to poor John Bull. That worthy gentleman, we
will admit, is in a sense more gross and beefy than his American cousin.
His nerves are stronger, for we need not decide whether they should be
called coarser or less morbid. He is not, in the proper sense of the
word, less imaginative, for a vigorous grasp of realities is rather a
proof of a powerful than a defective imagination. But he is less
accessible to those delicate impulses which are to the ordinary passions
as electricity to heat. His imagination is more intense and less mobile.
The devils which haunt the two races partake of the national
characteristics. John Bunyan, Dimmesdale's contemporary, suffered under
the pangs of a remorse equally acute, though with apparently far less
cause. The devils who tormented him whispered blasphemies in his ears;
they pulled at his clothes; they persuaded him that he had committed the
unpardonable sin. They caused the very stones in the streets and tiles
on the houses, as he says, to band themselves together against him. But
they had not the refined and humorous ingenuity of the American fiends.
They tempted him, as their fellows tempted Dimmesdale, to sell his soul;
but they were too much in earnest to insist upon queer breaches of
decorum. They did not indulge in that quaint play of fancy which tempts
us to believe that the devils in New England had seduced the 'tricksy
spirit,' Ariel, to indulge in practical jokes at the expense of a nobler
victim than Stephano or Caliban. They were too terribly diabolical to
care whether Bunyan blasphemed in solitude or in the presence of human
respectabilities. Bunyan's sufferings were as poetical, but less
conducive to refined speculation. His were