The word Adultery, although suggestively
enough present in one of the finest symbolical titles ever
devised by a romancer, does not once occur in the book. The sins
dealt with are hypocrisy and revenge. Arthur Dimmesdale, Hester
Prynne, and Roger Chillingworth are developing, suffering, living
creatures, caught inextricably in the toils of a moral situation.
By an incomparable succession of pictures Hawthorne exhibits the
travail of their souls. In the greatest scene of all, that
between Hester and Arthur in the forest, the Puritan framework of
the story gives way beneath the weight of human passion, and we
seem on the verge of another and perhaps larger solution than was
actually worked out by the logic of succeeding events. But
though the book has been called Christless, prayerless, hopeless,
no mature person ever reads it without a deepened sense of the
impotence of all mechanistic theories of sin, and a new vision of
the intense reality of spiritual things. "The law we broke," in
Dimmesdale's ghostly words, was a more subtle law than can be
graven on tables of stone and numbered as the Seventh
Commandment.
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