MY title should be explained, I wish to approach Hawthorne's masterpiece through "The Old Manse" and "The Custom House," the two great prefaces he wrote. In those prefaces, the one composed by way of introduction to "Mosses from an Old Manse" (1846) and the other as "introductory to The Scarlet Letter" (1850), Hawthorne unforgettably sketched himself as author. In terms of actual composition, "The Scarlet Letter" lies somewhat between the prefaces, for, although Hawthorne did not write all of "The Scarlet Letter" before composing "The Custom House" (as once was thought), he clearly wrote enough of it so that it could be said to lie between the two in the order of writing. Yet chronology of composition is not so important as the order of form. The one is the life of the artist ; the other is the life of art.

When we think of the life of art we are thinking about what for Hawthorne was primary and causal, not secondary and resultant. It is just this audacity of Hawthorne which Frederick Crews in "The Sins of the Fathers," an excellent book on Hawthorne, does not fully face. He will have Hawthorne's life the cause of his art, even though his book is primarily concerned with Hawthorne's fiction, not his life. Thus, for all his illuminating treatment of the fiction, Crews is probing the motives behind the characters' action, peering through the veil to read the unwritten scroll, and as he fixes on the motives of the characters he is both implying and implicating a shadowy Oedipal figure of Hawthorne behind the tales.