This man, who aspired so keenly to the joy of living, had a conscience profoundly sensitive to evil. It is the susceptibility of check, the Puritan repression of desire. We have no need to recall with what inflexibility, what morbid obstinacy Hawthorne discussed the problem of evil. Dostoievski was not more tragically, more persistently haunted by the idea of crime and punishment than he. “The House of Seven Gables” might just as well have been entitled “The House of Crime.” It is composed upon the theme that one does not escape a sin committed; that a misdeed is fatal in its results; that there is no redemption for the sinner. There is only immanent justice, as Emerson said, “eternal return”; according to Nietzsche, Fate, the authentic incarnation of the Calvinist predestination. It is not the act itself which constitutes sin, according to Hawthorne; it is the thought, the intention, and, as there is not a single human being who has not sheltered some criminal thought during the course of his life, it follows that we are all criminals. That is what Hawthorne repeated to satiety and what he wanted to prove in his books. But he went still farther, in a direction in which his Puritanism, because of its harshness, becomes sheer amorality. We think of Nietzsche’s “Beyond Good and Evil” when we read the numerous passages in which Hawthorne sustains the necessity of evil and consequently of crime. He does not hide it, for example, in connection with the two leading characters of “The Scarlet Letter.” He tells us that Reverend Dimmesdale’s remorse was “exquisite” as well as horrible. In “The Marble Faun” Donatello must commit a crime before Miriam will love him and utter that stupendous cry, “How beautiful he is!” Miriam holds that crime has lifted her poor Faun to a level superior to innocence; that Adam’s sin, repeated by Donatello, has brought his posterity to a higher, brighter level of happiness. It is remorse, Miriam tells us, which has awakened and developed in the Faun a thousand moral and intellectual faculties unknown till then. These are some of the moral paradoxes of the “Puritan” Hawthorne. However interesting he may be as a moralist, he is still more so as a psychologist. His moral sense was not without effect here. He is one of the few American authors whose ethics are supported by the problem of evil; he was led to explore the conscience and his diagnoses are striking. They are in many respects very modern, as I shall try to show from “The Scarlet Letter.”