no longer thrilled at the thought of a scarlet A on a woman’s breast; they would scarcely be thrilled by the spectacle of a whole scarlet alphabet hung round a woman’s neck like a collar. Yet Hawthorne’s novel survives--a fable of the permanent and dubious warfare between good and evil, in which good changes its shape into that of evil, and evil is transmuted into good through suffering. His genius survives, like that of Hans Andersen, because, not only does it carry the burden of morality, but it is led on its travels by a fancy wayward and caressing as the summer wind. He is the first prose myth-maker of America, and he has left no successors in his kind. XVI JONAH IN LANCASHIRE The author of _Patience_--the other _Patience_, I mean, not the Gilbert opera--is beginning to be discovered even by the average reader. It is not long since we had modernised versions of his two most remarkable poems, _Pearl_ and _Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight_. Gaston Paris describes the latter as “the jewel of English mediæval literature,” and even among those who read idly for amusement it should become a favourite book in Mr. Ernest Kirtlan’s easy rendering. Who the maker of these poems was we know not. Editors have invented a personal history for him, but other editors have ruthlessly pulled it to pieces. It was suggested that he wrote the romance _Sir Gawayne_ in his gaudy youth. Then, having lost a child, he composed in _Pearl_ a passionate lament for her. Afterwards, in the evening of his life, he wrote _Patience_ as an expression of his submission to the will of God. Mr. Bateson will have nothing to do either with this pathetic life-history or with the chronology. He regards _Patience_ as the earliest of the poems, and is of the opinion that _Pearl_, far from being a lament for a lost child, is “largely a theological discussion in elegiac form.” One would think there must be something seriously wrong in a poem about which a dispute of the kind could rage among the interpreters. But this is not necessarily so. No one denies that the _Song of Solomon_ is a great poem, and yet men have quarrelled as to whether it should be read as the holiest of symbolic poems or as an early masterpiece of the fleshly school of literature. Coming to _Patience_ itself, I fancy that the man who could discover personal confessions in it could discover personal confessions in Euclid. I find it difficult to believe in the bereaved father who turned for a lesson in resignation to the story of Jonah. It is the homilist, not the tortured human being, who fishes in the Book of Jonah for comfortable morals. _Patience_ is a sermon addressed to other people, not to the poet’s own soul. Feeling this, one may allow oneself to be amused by its quaintness as well as to admire the hue and vigour of its narrative.