Hawthorne's contemporaries in literary society were almost unanimous in their appreciation of the "genius" of the "shy gentleman from Salem". Some felt that his "distinguishing mark" was his feeling for the "latent romance of New England" expressing with a "beautiful touch" the Puritan faith of his fathers. That faith allowed the artist's imagination to take for granted a society that accepted a life of the spirit "more complex than anything that met the mere eye of sense." Remnants of Puritan asceticism, "the darkened outlook, the ingrained sense of sin and responsibility" would be found in the writings of the novelist from Concord.It may be argued that this element of Puritan "inspiration" is best expressed in "The Marble Faun". In this encounter with European culture, life. and art, Hawthorne works out his belief that beneath surfaces and behind veils lay "depths of meaning... which might be plumbed in the presence of human suffering". This is dramatized in the experience of his main characters, two couples and lovers whose passion for Life and Art links them in moral dilemmas and tragic ends. Miriam's past involves some "secret" guilt never explained, but which drives the plot and its passionately decisive action. Donatello's likeness to the "Marble Faun", and his supposed origins to a mischievous satyr, suggests a past of attractive natural innocence which embodies "the lust and instinctive joy with its destructive potential" civilization has learned to curb. Their counterparts, the Americans Hilda and Kenyon. seem to relate to these events as mere spectators and commentators. However, Hawthorne seems to give special attention to the solitary and saintly "copyist" as an example of the contagious power of evil. Hilda has executed a perfect copy of the Beatrice Cenci portrait whose ambiguity of guilt and innocence was its "salient quality" for observers. She shares a vision which deals only in Eternals and Ideas, and is shocked by a Miriam who suggests that the "real state of things may be more complicated". And yet how is she able to "catch" the precise inward and outward aspect of Beatrice Cenci, unless somewhere in her being, this 'daughter of the Puritans" does "know" sin. Later, when she sees the "glance" inciting Donatello to kill, involving her in the crime itself and precipitating the collapse of her static world, Hilda will be horrified to catch herself wearing the same expression as her copy of Cenci. Both she and Donatello experience a "fall" through a mere glance, but caught like a fever. Hilda no longer believes in the ability of Art to express the authentically real. The fall she has witnessed bars her forever from access to the vision of the Old Masters.Some readers might be interested in Hawthorne's alternative to the Puritan orthodoxy concerning life's meaning. He speaks through Kenyon who tries to convince Hilda to adopt the lessons conveyed through the events of Donatello's life: "Sin has educated and elevated him. Is Sin then--which we deem such a blackness in the Universe---is it like Sorrow, merely an element in human education, through which we struggle to a higher and purer state? ...Did Adam fall, that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier Paradise than his?"