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[267] statues of one another. Thoughtful and scholarly men created Massachusetts Colony, at least, and could at most bring hither the traditions of their universities and leave them embodied in a college. Their life was only historically inconsistent with what we now call culture; there was no logical antagonism; indeed, that life had in it much of the material of art in its sturdiness, its enthusiasm, and its truthfulness. To deny this is to see in art only something frivolous and insincere. Major John Hathorne put his offenders on trial and convicted and hanged them all. Nathaniel Hawthorne held his more spiritual tribunal two centuries later, and his keener scrutiny found some ground of vindication for each one. The fidelity, the thoroughness, the conscientious purpose, were the same in each. Each sought to rest his work, as all art must in the end rest, upon the absolute truth. The writer kept, no doubt, something of the sombreness of the magistrate; each nevertheless suffered in the woes he studied; and as Nathaniel Hawthorne “had a knot of pain in his forehead all winter” while meditating the doom of Arthur Dimmesdale,
Boston, New York and Chicago. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903.
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