It is a profound lesson about himself that the
Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale learns after his forest visit with Hester and their child.
For, while he has traversed the forest path after having decided with Hester that they
will leave the Massachusetts colony and return to England, Dimmedale has felt a sense of
release from his secret sin; this release is, however, a wicked one as he has been
tempted to commit "wild wicked things" as he encounters various members of his
congregation along the way. When he meets Mistress Hibbins, she recognizes in Dimmesdale
his wicked temptations and laughs at his protestations that he has not go into the
forest "to seek a potentate."
After this chance meeting
with Mistress Hibbins, "the old-witch lady," the minister
wonders,
"Have
I then sold myself...to the fiend whom, if men say true, this yellow-starched and
velveted old hag has chosen for her prince and
master!"
Dimmesdale concludes
that he has indeed "made a bargain very like it!" Tempted by the dream of escape,
Dimmesdale has yielded himself to "what he knew was deadly sin." His encounter with
Mistriss Hibbins has, thus, brought to light his ridicule of good and evil, his
"unprovoked malignity" and "gratuitous desire of
ill."
Returning home, Dimmesdale enters the room where he
has been working on the Election Sermon. As he peruses the unfinished sermon, the
minister perceives that now, after his forest visit, he is not the same
man,
But he
seemed to stand apart, and eye his former self with scorful, pitying, but half-envious
curiosity. That self was
gone.
Dimmesdale learns that
another man has come from the forest; he is a wiser one, one with the awareness of
"hidden mysteries" which the simplicity of his former self has not admitted. Arthur
Dimmesdale fully recognizes his great sin--"A bitter kind of knowledge that!" as he
admits to himself his great hypocrisy and guilt for which he knows he will be
punished.
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