he
introductory chapter. In fact, the publication of _The Scarlet Letter_
was in the United States a literary event of the first importance. The
book was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the
country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome that was
given it--a satisfaction in the idea of America having produced a
novel that belonged to literature, and to the forefront of it.
Something might at last be sent to Europe as exquisite in quality as
anything that had been received, and the best of it was that the thing
was absolutely American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came
out of the very heart of New England.

It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest
degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's
best things--an indefinable purity and lightness of conception, a
quality which in a work of art affects one in the same way as the
absence of grossness does in a human being. His fancy, as I just now
said, had evidently brooded over the subject for a long time; the
situation to be represented had disclosed itself to him in all its
phases. When I say in all its phases, the sentence demands
modification; for it is to be remembered that if Hawthorne laid his
hand upon the well-worn theme, upon the familiar combination of the
wife, the lover, and the husband, it was after all but to one period
of the history of these three persons that he attached himself. The
situation is the situation after the woman's fault has been committed,
and the current of expiation and repentance has set in. In spite of
the relation between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, no story of
love was surely ever less of a "love story." To Hawthorne's
imagination the fact that these two persons had loved each other too
well was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed to him was
the idea of their moral situation in the long years that were to
follow. The story indeed is in a secondary degree that of Hester
Prynne; she becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory
figure; it is not upon her the _denoument_ depends. It is upon her
guilty lover that the author projects most frequently the cold, thin
rays of his fitfully-moving lantern, which makes here and there a
little luminous circle, on the edge of which hovers the livid and
sinister figure of the injured and retributive husband. The story goes
on for the most part between the lover and the husband--the