Before Mr. Dimmesdale reached home his inner man gave him other evidences of a revolution in the sphere of thought and feeling. In truth, nothing short of a total change of dynasty and moral code in that interior kingdom was adequate to account for the impulses now communicated to the unfortunate and startled minister. At every step he was incited to do some strange, wild, wicked thing or other, with a sense that it would be at once involuntary and intentional, in spite of himself, yet growing out of a profounder self than that which opposed the impulse. Such I believe to be the basic meaning of this masterpiece, spoiled again, unfortunately, by an edifying ending. Hawthorne was one of the novelists best acquainted with man’s conscience. Less fecund than many, he had the wisdom and talent to concentrate his genius and thought upon the study of a preëminently human problem, that of evil and responsibility. Besides the genius of intuition he had that of symbolism. This realistic psychologist was a marvelous imagist. He himself has given us a striking formula of his art. Art, according to him, is the light of thought and imagination shining through what he called “the opaque substance of days.” Like Emerson, he considered wonder as an essential human faculty. Intuitive sympathy alone, he believed, could solve the mysteries of existence. To come to truth one must possess the innocent and naïve insight of a child. For the purpose of knowing better the external world, Hawthorne loved to look at it through the symbols which his prolific imagination presented to him. One may even find that he carried symbolization to excess. Two of his novels, in particular “The House of the Seven Gables” and “The Marble Faun,” are, in certain regards, veritable allegories. He found everywhere affinities between man and things. He gave a soul to inanimate objects and made of them a tangible extension of our personality. In “The House of the Seven Gables,” everything, from the cellar to the garret, even the chicken yard and the well, is so imagined as to give us the impression of the curse which weighs on the old abode. In its antique frame “The Marble Faun” is conceived in the same manner. Portraits which are alive, human faces which seem to reincarnate pictures and statues, the strange resemblance, for instance, between Miriam in “The Marble Faun” and the portrait of Beatrice Cenci, or the statue of Cleopatra, mirrors in whose depth float ghost faces, mysteries of dusk and shadow, mysteries of human voices--the symbolism of Hawthorne is as rich as that of Edgar Poe and adds another charm to his novels. CHAPTER III _Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Dean Howells and American Society on Parade_