Hawthorne was not wholly a fatalist, or he never could have conceived
the character of Donatello, but he was very largely so. A man for whom a
life of action is impossible, and who is thus unable to escape wholly
from his own shadow, naturally comes to look on any series of events as
an inevitable chain of cause and effect. He speaks somewhere of Byron's
virtues and vices as being so closely interwoven that he could not have
had one without the other, and if the objectionable passages in his
poetry were expurgated, the life and genius of it would go with them.
His story of "The Birth-mark" is an allegory of the same description. He
did not agree with Shakspeare, that the best men are moulded out of
faults, but believed that as we are in the beginning, so we remain
essentially till the end.
He says that whenever Margaret Fuller heard of a rare virtue, she wished
to possess it and adorn herself with it; so that she finally became a
sort of brilliant external patchwork, dazzling to the eye, but
internally quite different. There is a certain truth in this, but it is
not a whole truth; for there is Socrates--a compendium of all the
ancient virtues, consistent throughout, and who formed himself in the
manner Hawthorne describes. It is true that in a search after rare and
exceptional virtues we are apt to lose sight of the more homely kind
which form the bone and sinew of human-life.
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