Nathaniel Hawthorne/Nathaniel Hawthorne.iso/pc/articles/a1/t0013

Text File | 1998-01-06 | 15.1 KB | 219 lines

                                                         XI                                                    158
                                       The Interior of a Heart

AFTER the incident last described, the intercourse between the clergyman
and the physician, though externally the same, was really of another
character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger Chillingworth
had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that
which he had laid out for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as he
appeared, there was yet, we fear, a quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but
active now, in this unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more
intimate revenge than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To
make himself the one trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the
fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush
of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from the
world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be revealed to
him, the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving! All that dark treasure to be
lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the
debt of vengeance!
     The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme.
Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all, less
satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence--using the avenger
and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it
seemed most to punish--had substituted for his black devices. A revelation,
he could almost say, had been granted to him. It mattered little, for his
object, whether celestial, or from what other region. By its aid, in all the
subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the
               The Scarlet Letter -- XI. The Interior of a Heart              159

external presence, but the very inmost soul of the latter seemed to be
brought out before his eyes, so that he could see and comprehend its every
movement. He became, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor,
in the poor minister's interior world. He could play upon him as he chose.
Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was for ever on the
rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the engine;--and the
physician knew it well! Would he startle him with sudden fear? As at the
waving of a magician's wand, uprose a grisly phantom,--uprose a thousand
phantoms,--in many shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking
roundabout the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at his breast!
     All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the minister,
though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil influence watching
over him, could never gain a knowledge of its actual nature. True, he
looked doubtfully, fearfully,--even, at times, with horror and the bitterness
of hatred,--at the deformed figure of the old physician. His gestures, his
gait, his grizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, the very
fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman's sight; a token,
implicitly to be relied on, of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than
he was willing to acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to
assign a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale,
conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entire
substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause. He took
himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger Chillingworth,
disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from them, and did his
               The Scarlet Letter -- XI. The Interior of a Heart              160

best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this, he nevertheless, as a
matter of principle, continued his habits of social familiarity with the old
man, and thus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purpose to
which--poor, forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched than his
victim--the avenger had devoted himself.
     While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by
some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of his
deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant
popularity in his sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great part, by his
sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power of
experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state of
preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily life. His fame,
though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed the soberer
reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of them were. There
were scholars among them, who had spent more years in acquiring abstruse
lore, connected with the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived;
and who might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in such solid
and valuable attainments than their youthful brother. There were men, too,
of a sturdier texture of mind than his, and endowed with a far greater share
of shrewd, hard, iron or granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a
fair proportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable,
efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were others,
again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been elaborated by weary toil
among their books, and by patient thought, and etherealized, moreover, by
               The Scarlet Letter -- XI. The Interior of a Heart              161

spiritual communications with the better world, into which their purity of
life had almost introduced these holy personages, with their garments of
mortality still clinging to them. All that they lacked was the gift that
descended upon the chosen disciples, at Pentecost, in tongues of flame;
symbolizing, it would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and
unknown languages, but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood
in the heart's native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked
Heaven's last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of Flame.
They would have vainly sought--had they ever dreamed of seeking--to
express the highest truths through the humblest medium of familiar words
and images. Their voices came down, afar and indistinctly, from the upper
heights where they habitually dwelt.
     Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr. Dimmesdale,
by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To their high
mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed, had not the
tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might be, of crime or
anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It kept him down, on a
level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice the
angels might else have listened to and answered! But this very burden it
was, that gave him sympathies so intimate with the sinful brotherhood of
mankind; so that his heart vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their
pain into itself, and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other
hearts, in gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but
sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them thus.
               The Scarlet Letter -- XI. The Interior of a Heart              162

They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They fancied him
the mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, and rebuke, and love.
In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was sanctified. The virgins
of his church grew pale around him, victims of a passion so imbued with
religious sentiment that they imagined it to be all religion, and brought it
openly, in their white bosoms, as their most acceptable sacrifice before the
altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale's frame
so feeble, while they were themselves so rugged in their infirmity, believed
that he would go heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their
children, that their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor's
holy grave. And, all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was
thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the grass would
ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must there be buried!
     It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration tortured
him! It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to reckon all things
shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value, that had not its divine
essence as the life within their life. Then, what was he?--a substance?--or
the dimmest of all shadows? He longed to speak out, from his own pulpit,
at the full height of his voice, and tell the people what he was. "I, whom
you behold in these black garments of the priesthood,--I, who ascend the
sacred desk, and turn my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold
communion, in your behalf, with the Most High Omniscience,--I, in whose
daily life you discern the sanctity of Enoch,-- I, whose footsteps, as you
suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track, whereby the pilgrims that
               The Scarlet Letter -- XI. The Interior of a Heart              163

shall come after me may be guided to the regions of the blest,--I, who have
laid the hand of baptism upon your children,--I, who have breathed the
parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded faintly
from a world which they had quitted,--I, your pastor, whom you so
reverence and trust, am utterly a pollution and a lie!"
     More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a
purpose never to come down its steps, until he should have spoken words
like the above. More than once, he had cleared his throat, and drawn in the
long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent forth again, would
come burdened with the black secret of his soul. More than once--nay, more
than a hundred times--he had actually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had
told his hearers that he was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest,
the worst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity; and
that the only wonder was, that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled
up before their eyes, by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there be
plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their seats, by a
simultaneous impulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he
defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and did but reverence him the
more. They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in those self-
condemning words. "The godly youth!" said they among themselves. "The
saint on earth! Alas, if he discern such sinfulness in his own white soul,
what horrid spectacle would he behold in thine or mine!" The minister well
knew--subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!--the light in which his
vague confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon
               The Scarlet Letter -- XI. The Interior of a Heart              164

himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained only
one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the momentary
relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very truth, and
transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the constitution of
his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as few men ever did.
Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his miserable self!
     His inward trouble drove him to practices, more in accordance with the
old, corrupted faith of Rome, than with the better light of the church in
which he had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale's secret closet, under
lock and key, there was a bloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and
Puritan divine had plied it on his own shoulders; laughing bitterly at himself
the while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly, because of that bitter
laugh. It was his custom, too, as it has been that of many other pious
Puritans, to fast,--not, however, like them, in order to purify the body and
render it the fitter medium of celestial illumination,--but rigorously, and
until his knees trembled beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils,
likewise night after night, sometimes in utter darkness; sometimes with a
glimmering lamp; and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-glass,
by the most powerful light which he could throw upon it. He thus typified
the constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but could not purify,
himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions
seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint light of
their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or more vividly, and close
beside him, within the looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes,
               The Scarlet Letter -- XI. The Interior of a Heart              165

that grinned and mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with
them; now a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-
laden, but grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the dead friends of
his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint-like frown, and his
mother, turning her face away as she passed by. Ghost of a mother,--
thinnest fantasy of a mother,--methinks she might yet have thrown a pitying
glance towards her son! And now, through the chamber which these
spectral thoughts had made so ghastly, glided Hester Prynne, leading along
little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first, at the
scarlet letter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast.
     None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by an
effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty lack of
substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in their nature, like
yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square, leathern-bound and brazen-
clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the
truest and most substantial things which the poor minister now dealt with. It
is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his, that it steals the pith and
substance out of whatever realities there are around us, and which were
meant by Heaven to be the spirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man,
the whole universe is false,--it is impalpable,--it shrinks to nothing within
his grasp. And he himself, in so far as he shows himself in a false light,
becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth, that
continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth, was the
anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it in his
               The Scarlet Letter -- XI. The Interior of a Heart              166

aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of gayety, there
would have been no such man!
     On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but
forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new thought
had struck him. There might be a moment's peace in it. Attiring himself
with as much care as if it had been for public worship, and precisely in the
same manner, he stole softly down the staircase, undid the door, and issued
forth.