In Hawthorne, on the contrary, persons are commonly conceived in their relations to laws, and hold a second place in his mind. In “The Scarlet Letter,” which made a deeper impression on the public than any romance ever published in the United States, there is little true characterization, in the ordinary meaning of the term. The characters are not really valuable for what they are, but for what they illustrate. Imagination is predominant throughout the work, but it is imagination in its highest analytic rather than dramatic action. And this is the secret of the strange fascination which fastens attention to its horrors. It is not Hester or Dimmesdale that really interest us, but the spectacle of the human mind open to the retribution of violated law, and quivering in the agonies of shame and remorse. It is the law and not the person that is vitally conceived, and accordingly the author traces its sure operation with an unshrinking intellect that, for the time, is remorseless to persons. As an illustration of the Divine order on which our conventional order rests, it is the most moral book of the age; and is especially valuable as demonstrating the superficiality of that code of ethics, predominant in the French school of romance, which teaches obedience to individual instinct and impulse, regardless of all moral truths which contain the generalized experience of the race. The purpose of the book did not admit of geniality. Adultery has been made genial by many poets and novelists, but only by considering it under a totally different aspect from that in which Hawthorne viewed it. Geniality in “The Scarlet Letter” would be like an ice-cream shop in Dante’s Inferno.