prefaces, journals, and note-books.
This may account for the moral allegories which too weirdly haunt some of
his short, early pieces. Edgar Poe, in a passage full of very honest and
well-chosen praise, found fault with the allegorical business.

Mr. Hutton, from whose "Literary Essays" I borrow Poe's opinion, says:
"Poe boldly asserted that the conspicuously ideal scaffoldings of
Hawthorne's stories were but the monstrous fruits of the bad
transcendental atmosphere which he breathed so long." But I hope this
way of putting it is not Poe's. "Ideal scaffoldings," are odd enough,
but when scaffoldings turn out to be "fruits" of an "atmosphere," and
monstrous fruits of a "bad transcendental atmosphere," the brain reels in
the fumes of mixed metaphors. "Let him mend his pen," cried Poe, "get a
bottle of visible ink, come out from the Old Manse, cut Mr. Alcott," and,
in fact, write about things less impalpable, as Mr. Mallock's heroine
preferred to be loved, "in a more human sort of way."

Hawthorne's way was never too ruddily and robustly human. Perhaps, even
in "The Scarlet Letter," we feel too distinctly that certain characters
are moral conceptions, not warmed and wakened out of the allegorical into
the real. The persons in an allegory may be real enough, as Bunyan has
proved by examples. But that culpable clergyman, Mr. Arthur Dimmesdale,
with his large, white brow, his melancholy eyes, his hand on his heart,
and his general resemblance to the High Church Curate in Thackeray's "Our
Street," is he real? To me he seems very unworthy to be Hester's lover,
for she is a beautiful woman of flesh and blood. Mr. Dimmesdale was not
only immoral; he was unsportsmanlike. He had no more pluck than a church-
mouse. His miserable passion was degraded by its brevity; how could he
see this woman's disgrace for seven long years, and never pluck up heart
either to share her shame or _peccare forliter_? He is a lay figure,
very cleverly, but somewhat conventionally made and painted. The
vengeful husband of Hester, Roger Chillingworth, is a Mr. Casaubon stung
into jealous anger. But his attitude, watching ever by Dimmesdale,
tormenting him, and yet in his confidence, and ever unsuspected, reminds
one of a conception dear to Dickens. He uses it in "David Copperfield,"
where Mr. Micawber (of all people!) plays this trick on Uriah Heep; he
uses it in "Hunted Down"; he was about using it in "Edwin Drood"; he used
it (old Martin