However Freudian these diagnoses may appear in form, they are hardly so intentionally. The treatment to which Chillingworth submits his patient is conceived to be a torture and not a cure; Chillingworth, an able practitioner perhaps, is a very poor psychologist. Without in the least suspecting it, he works against his own ends. He never suspects that the day when Dimmesdale will reveal his secret to him will find him not punished but relieved, and in reality cured, according to Freud, and that he, Chillingworth, will have lost his time and pains as a psychoanalyst. This is exactly what happens. Once freed from repression and anxiety, Dimmesdale reveals himself to be a new man, a man in the full sense of the word for the first time, and now he cares neither for his fears nor for Chillingworth who has exploited them. The true healer of Dimmesdale is not Chillingworth, it is Hester Prynne. * * * * * I have already told what admiration I hold for this ending of “The Scarlet Letter.” Hawthorne reveals himself here to be not only a profound psychologist and audacious moralist but a great poet. I want to quote at length the scene in the forest where repressions and inhibitions are drowned in “a flood of sunshine”: Hester heaved a long, deep sigh, in which the burden of shame and anguish departed from her spirit. O exquisite relief! She had not known the weight until she felt the freedom! By another impulse she took off the formal cap that confined her hair, and down it fell upon her shoulders, dark and rich, with at once a shadow and a light in its abundance, and imparting the charm of softness to her features. There played around her mouth and beamed out of her eyes, a radiant and tender smile, that seemed gushing from the very heart of womanhood. A crimson flush was glowing on her cheek, that had been long so pale. Her sex, her youth, and the whole richness of her beauty, came back from what men call the irrevocable past, and clustered themselves, with her maiden hope and a happiness before unknown, within the magic circle of this hour. And, as if the gloom of the earth and sky had been but the effluence of these two mortal hearts, it vanished with their sorrow. All at once, as with a sudden smile of heaven, forth burst the sunshine, pouring a very flood into the obscure forest, gladdening each green leaf, transmuting the yellow fallen ones to gold, and gleaming adown the gray trunks of the solemn trees. The objects that had made a shadow hitherto embodied the brightness now. The course of the little brook might be traced by its merry gleam afar into the wood’s heart of mystery, which had become a mystery of joy.