on her
ignominy. Although the moral tone of the book is one of almost
unrelieved gloom, the actual scenes are full of colour and light.
Pearl's scarlet frock with its fantastic embroideries, the
magnificent velvet gown and white ruff of the old dame who rides
off by night to the witch-revels in the forest, the group of Red
Indians in their deer-skin robes and wampum belts of red and
yellow ochre, the bronzed faces and gaudy attire of the Spanish
pirates, all stand out in bold relief among the sober greys and
browns of the Puritans. The tense, emotional atmosphere is
heightened by the festive brightness of the outer world.

The light of Hawthorne's imagination is directed mainly on three
characters--Hester, Arthur, and the elf-like child Pearl, the
living symbol of their union. Further in the background lurks the
malignant figure of Roger Chillingworth, contriving his fiendish
scheme of vengeance, "violating in cold blood the sanctity of a
human heart." The blaze of the Scarlet Letter compels us by a
strange magnetic power to follow Hester Prynne wherever she goes,
but her suffering is less acute and her character less intricate
than her lover's. She bears the outward badge of shame, but after
"wandering without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind," wins a
dull respite from anguish as she glides "like a grey and sober
shadow" over the threshold of those who are visited by sorrow. At
the last, when Dimmesdale's spirit is "so shattered and subdued
that it could hardly hold itself erect," Hester has still energy
to plan and to act. His 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