" Open the pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within the
framework of established institutions, with no desire to shatter the
existing scheme of social order, choosing as its heroes men of the
meeting-house, town-meeting, and training-day, how intensely
nevertheless does the imagination of this fiction-writer illuminate the
Body and the Soul!

Take first the Body. The inheritance of English Puritanism may be
traced throughout our American writing, in its reverence for physical
purity. The result is something unique in literary history. Continental
critics, while recognizing the intellectual and artistic powers
revealed in _The Scarlet Letter_, have seldom realized the awfulness,
to the Puritan mind, of the very thought of an adulterous minister.
That a priest in southern Europe should break his vows is indeed
scandalous; but the sin is regarded as a failure of the natural man to
keep a vow requiring supernatural grace for its fulfilment; it may be
that the priest had no vocation for his sacred office; he is unfrocked,
punished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human charity still covers
his offence. But in the Puritan scheme (and _The Scarlet Letter_, save
for that one treacherous, warm human moment in the woodland where "all
was spoken," lies wholly within the set framework of Puritanism) there
is no forgiveness for a sin of the flesh. There is only Law, Law
stretching on into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. Hawthorne
knew his Protestant New England through and through. _The Scarlet
Letter_ is the most striking example in our national literature of that
idealization of physical purity, but hundreds of other romances and
poems, less morbid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms the same
moral conviction, the same ideal.

Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a less adulterous novel
than this book which plays so artistically with the letter A. The body
is branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, transfigured by the
intense rays of light emitted from the suffering soul.

"The soul is form and doth the body make."

In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, Hawthorne's romance is in
unison with the more mystical and spiritual utterances of Catholicism
as well as of Protestantism. It was in part a resultant of that early
American isolation which contributed so effectively to the artistic
setting of _The Scarlet Letter_. But in his doctrine of spiritual
integrity, in the agonized utterance,