You can't keep a wife by force of an intellectual tradition. So Hester took to seducing Dimmesdale. Yet her only marriage, and her last oath, is with the old Roger. He and she are accomplices in pulling down the spiritual saint. "Why dost thou smile so at me--" she says to her old, vengeful husband. "Art thou not like the Black Man that haunts the forest around us? Hast thou not enticed me into a bond which will prove the ruin of my soul?" "Not thy soul!" he answered with another smile. "No, not thy soul!" It is the soul of the pure preacher, that false thing, which they are after. And the crippled physician--this other healer--blackly vengeful in his old, distorted male authority, and the "loving" woman, they bring down the saint between them. A black and complementary hatred, akin to love, is what Chillingworth feels for the young, saintly parson. And Dimmesdale responds, in a hideous kind of love. Slowly the saint's life is poisoned. But the black old physician smiles, and tries to keep him alive. Dimmesdale goes in for self-torture, self-lashing, lashing his own white, thin, spiritual saviour's body. The dark old Chillingworth listens outside the door and laughs, and prepares another medicine, so that the game can go on longer. And the saint's very soul goes rotten. Which is the supreme triumph. Yet he keeps up appearances still. The black, vengeful soul of the crippled, masterful male, still dark in his authority: and the white ghastliness of the fallen saint! The two halves of manhood mutually destroying one another. Dimmesdale has a "coup" in the very end. He gives the whole show away by confessing publicly on the scaffold, and dodging into death, leaving Hester dished, and Roger as it were, doubly cuckolded. It is a neat last revenge. Down comes the curtain, as in Ligeia's poem. But the child Pearl will be on in the next act, with her Italian Count and a new brood of vipers. And Hester greyly Abelling, in the shadows, after her rebelling. It is a marvellous allegory. It is to me one of the greatest allegories in all literature, _The Scarlet Letter._ Its marvellous under-meaning! And its perfect duplicity. The absolute duplicity of that blue-eyed _Wunderkind_ of a Nathaniel. The American wonder-child, with his magical allegorical insight. But even wonder-children have to grow up in a generation or two. And even SIN becomes stale. VIII. HAWTHORNE'S "BLITHEDALE ROMANCE" No other book of Nathaniel Hawthorne is so deep, so dual, and so complete as _The Scarlet Letter_: this great allegory of the triumph of sin. Sin is a queer thing. It isn't the breaking of divine commandments. It is the breaking of one's own integrity. For instance, the sin in Hester and Arthur Dimmesdale's case was a sin because they did what they _thought_ it _wrong_ to do. If they had really _wanted_ to be lovers, and if they had had the honest courage of their own passion, there would have been no sin: even had the desire been only momentary.