Inquisition and torture are akin to murder: the same lust. It is a combat between inquisitor and victim as to whether the inquisitor shall get at the quick of life itself, and pierce it. Pierce the very quick of the soul. The evil will of man tries to do this. The brave soul of man refuses to have the life-quick pierced in him. It is strange: but just as the thwarted will can persist evilly, after death, so can the brave spirit preserve, even through torture and death, the quick of life and truth. Nowadays society is evil. It finds subtle ways of torture, to destroy the life-quick, to get at the life-quick in a man. Every possible form. And still a man can hold out, if he can laugh and listen to the Holy Ghost.--But society is evil, evil, and love is evil. And evil breeds evil, more and more. So the mystery goes on. La Bruyère says that all our human unhappinesses _viennent de ne voir être seuls._ As long as man lives he will be subject to the yearning of love or the burning of hate, which is only inverted love. But he is subject to something more than this. If we do not live to eat, we do not live to love either. We live to stand alone, and listen to the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost, who is inside us, and who is many gods. Many gods come and go, some say one thing and some say another, and we have to obey the God of the innermost hour. It is the multiplicity of gods within us make up the Holy Ghost. But Poe knew only love, love, love, intense vibrations and heightened consciousness. Drugs, women, self-destruction, but anyhow the prismatic ecstasy of heightened consciousness and sense of love, of flow. The human soul in him was beside itself. But it was not lost. He told us plainly how it was, so that we should know. He was an adventurer into vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul. He sounded the horror and the warning of his own doom. Doomed he was. He died wanting more love, and love killed him. A ghastly disease, love. Poe telling us of his disease: trying even to make his disease fair and attractive. Even succeeding. Which is the inevitable falseness, duplicity of art, American Art in particular. VII. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE AND "THE SCARLET LETTER" Nathaniel Hawthorne writes romance. And what's romance? Usually, a nice little tale where you have everything As You Like It, where rain never wets your jacket and gnats never bite your nose and its always daisy-time. _As You Like It_ and _Forest Lovers_, etc. _Morte D'Arthur._ Hawthorne obviously isn't this kind of romanticist: though nobody has muddy boots in the _Scarlet Letter_, either. But there is more to it. _The Scarlet Letter_ isn't a pleasant, pretty romance. It is a sort of parable, an earthly story with a hellish meaning.