Its
power could neither be denied nor resisted. There were growls of
disapprobation from novel-readers, that Hester Prynne and the Rev. Mr.
Dimmesdale were subjected to cruel punishments unknown to the
jurisprudence of fiction,--that the author was an inquisitor who put
his victims on the rack,--and that neither amusement nor delight
resulted from seeing the contortions and hearing the groans of these
martyrs of sin; but the fact was no less plain that Hawthorne had for
once compelled the most superficial lovers of romance to submit
themselves to the magic of his genius. The readers of Dickens voted
him, with three times three, to the presidency of their republic of
letters; the readers of Hawthorne were caught by a _coup d'etat_, and
fretfully submitted to a despot whom they could not depose.
The success of "The Scarlet Letter" is an example of the advantage
which an author gains by the simple concentration of his powers on one
absorbing subject. In the "Twice-Told Tales" and the "Mosses from an
Old Manse" Hawthorne had exhibited a wider range of sight and insight
than in "The Scarlet Letter." Indeed, in the little sketch of "Endicott
and the Red Cross," written twenty years before, he had included in a
few sentences the whole matter which he afterwards treated in his
famous story.
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