The Scarlet Letter: A Romance - Section 14 - The Interior of a Heart

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Dream Audio Books presents section fourteen of The Scarlet Letter
by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Chapter eleven, 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

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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,

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which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge than
any mortal had ever reeked upon an enemy, to make
himself the one trusted friend to whom should be confided.
All fear, the remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the
backward rush of sinful thoughts, expelled in vain, all that

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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

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and sensitive reserve had bulked 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

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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 mister Dimmesdale, not
merely the external presence, but the very inmost soul of

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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 forever on the rack.

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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 grizzly phantom, uprose a thousand phantoms in
any shapes of death or more awful shame, all flocking

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round about 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,

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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

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a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than
he was willing to acknowledge to himself. Four. As it
was impossible to assign a reason for such distrust and abhorrence,
sod Dimsdale, conscious that the poison of one morbid spot
was infecting his heart's entire substance, attributed all his presentiments

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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 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

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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,

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the reverend mister Dimsdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in
his safe 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

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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 law connected
with the divine profession that mister Dimmesdale had lived, and

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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

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doctrinal ingredient constitutes, are 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 spiritual

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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

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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

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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 mister Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character,

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naturally belonged to the 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.

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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 to a thousand other

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hearts in gushes of sad persuasive eloquence, oftenest persuasive, but
sometimes terrible. The people knew not the power that moved them.
Thus they deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness.
They fancied him the mouthpiece of Heaven's messages of wisdom

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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

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as their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar. The aged
members of his flock beholding mister 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,

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when poor mister Dimsdale 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

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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

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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

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life you discern the sanctity of Enoch, I whose footsteps
as you suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track,
whereby the pilgrims that 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

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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
mister Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit with a purpose

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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,

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But how he had told his hearers that he was
altogether vile, a viler, companion of the vilist, 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 shriveled up before their eyes by the
burning wrath of the almighty. Could there be plainer speech

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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

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saint on earth. Alas if he discerned 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

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a cheat upon 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

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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

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in which he had been born and bred. In mister
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

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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 san celestial illumination, but rigorously,
and until his knees trembled beneath him. As an act

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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

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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

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herd of diabolic shapes 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

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face away as she passed by. Goost 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 a long little pearl in her

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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

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they were not solid in their nature, like yonder table
carved oak, or that big square, leaven 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

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misery of a life so false as his, that it
steals the pith and the 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

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far as he shows himself in a false light, becomes
a shadow, or indeed ceases to exist. The only truth
that continued to give mister Dimmesdale a real existence on
this earth was the anguish in his inmost soul, and
the undissembled expression of it in his aspect, had he

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once found power to smile, and where a face of gaiety,
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,
and you thought had struck him there might be a

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moment's peace in it, attiring himself with as much care
as if it had been for public worship. And in
precisely the same manner he stole softly down the staircase,
undid the door, and issued forth. End of Section fourteen,
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