in speech, they hold themselves nicely aloof from daily idiom. The workmen speak the language of books, and the children, a simplified, but exquisitely literary English.

Hawthorne's world, too, is a symbolic world, full of echoes of spiritual life, full of fine and unexpected correspondences with abstract moral truth, full of conscious Deity. All things work together for the revelation of spiritual beauty and its attending moods. Symbols abound; scarlet letters blaze in the heavens; crimson roses bloom by prison doors. The general background of each romance has a special aptness for rendering more delicately conspicuous the spiritual meaning of the action. In the Marble Faun, which is everywhere studious of the deepest and most permanent of human problems, the mystery of evil, — and which devotes itself to illustrating this problem in symbolic form, Rome, the city that more than any other contains richly accumulated memories of the human race, forms the setting for the action, and embraces it in a range of thought and feeling that enhances the typical and universal quality of the incidents and characters. The Scarlet Letter, the Romance of Expiation, finds its appropriate setting in the midst of the obdurately gray life of Puritanism that will reveal its inner flame only when sin or superstition gives the provocation.. An intense racial demand for righteousness heightens artistically and renders doubly appreciable the quality of Hester's sin and tragic suffering. Even the Blithedale Romance has its own atmosphere. The actors are "solitary sentinels, whose station was on the outposts of the advance guard of human progression . . . whose present bivouac was considerably further into the waste of chaos than any mortal army of crusaders had ever marched before."

Yet, notwithstanding all this vagueness and mystery, and this confessedly elaborate dreaming in the interests of morals and beauty, Hawthorne's world is a very habitable world. He is the most human of ghost-raisers, and life as he portrays it, though haunted and prescient, has after all geniality and warmth. This comes from the fact that his romances, in obedience to the rule he himself has prescribed, are loyal to "the truth of the human heart." Though he is a dreamer, his dreams remain faithful to what is best in human nature. He is a true appreciator of the griefs and the

joys, the struggles and the passions that make up the drama of actual life. He portrays with loving reverence the frailty of children, the fragile grace of young girls; the mischances of the vanquished in the struggle of life; the wretchedness of those who like Hester and Zenobia have been ill-fated in love; the pathetic shortcomings of unhappily tempered natures like Clifford and Miriam. He is swift to honor both in men and women spiritual intensity and consecration and fortitude. The more practical, every-day virtues of prudence and justice, truth and persistent courage, he also exalts, though these are more apt to be taken for granted and presented casually, as in his conventional hero, Kenyon. Ardent disregard of tradition and custom in the pursuit of lofty conceptions of virtue and progress, he sympathetically portrays in Holgrave, in Miles Coverdale, and in the Artist of the Beautiful. Worldly cleverness and success, he satirizes incidentally in many short stories and above all in the character of Judge Pyncheon. Hawthorne is a dreamer who finds the great need of the world to be "sleep," rest from its "morbid activity, . . . so that the race might in due time awake as an infant out of dewy slumber and be restored to the simple perception of what is right, and the single-hearted desire to achieve it." Yet despite his distrust of conventionality and custom, his dreaming habit of mind, and his delight in the other-worldly, he is in his moral appreciations of conduct essentially normal and loves and honors the virtues and achievements that all good men and women believe in and vibrate responsively to. And the truth and habitableness of his world, despite its modulated atmosphere and its half-goblin populace, come from its essential loyalty to the demands and the awards of the normal human heart.

Hawthorne's world differs here completely from the world into which the modern decadents induct us, - from Poe's world, too. Ghastliness, mystery, horror, are never with Hawthorne's ends in themselves; they never usurp, but are made to minister to the normal interests of well-balanced life. Moreover, the artificiality of Hawthorne's characters and the directed sequences of the action seem in a way more justified than the capricious arabesques of weird incident and morbid motive that decadents delight to invent, for Hawthorne never plays fast and loose with essential truth or

palters with human nature, and through his most extravagant make-believe is felt the deep guiding stress of a virile love of

life.

Perhaps the severest criticism that can be passed upon Hawthorne is to the effect that he is too responsible in all that he writes and that his wish to teach is irritatingly evident. He is not content to take life simply and frankly, he is over-anxious, and is careful about many spiritual things. He has inherited from his Puritan ancestors a hypertrophied conscience which tricks him into perpetual unrest. He must always be studying some moral problem, and he finds the problem the more interesting the more pathological it is. His favorite characters are nearly all of them a bit morbid, -nervously touched; their world is drained of the splendor and freedom and irresponsible joy of nature and is discolored with something of the withering grayness of Puritanism. When Hawthorne makes a resolute attempt at carnality, as he now and then does in the Blithedale Romance, we feel that he is doing himself violence and sacrificing what is quintessential in his nature. Nor is he merely over-anxious and over-didactic; he is at times obvious and almost naïve, particularly in his talk about art and in his occasional analysis of motive. This becomes specially noticeable if he be read just after subtle and sophisticated modern writers, masters of finesse in etiquette and art. Many of the discussions in the Marble Faun upon Guido and the Venus de Medici must nowadays be discreetly waived. Many of the descriptions of antiquities and of scenery have an unapologetic effusiveness that suggests the garrulity of the American who is for the first time "doing" Europe. Latter-day guide-books borrow largely from these passages, a somewhat dubious honor. There is little intellectual subtlety in Hawthorne, little unalloyed study of pure artistic effect, little of that undistracted preoccupation with sensation and its accompanying moods and its suggested trains of imagery to which modern decadent art has often surrendered itself.

On the other hand, the richness and depth of Hawthorne's nature is attested by the humor that is unmistakably present in many of his stories and that, in the form of a tenderly tolerant sense of the incongruities of life, is never far away even from the

most sincerely pathetic episodes. His tone is always intensely human, never that of the cynical observer of men's foibles or of the dilettante elaborator of artistic effects. He loves life and believes in life; he believes in men and women; and his abounding tenderness and human sympathy are not really weakened or obscured by the aloofness he maintains in his art from the crude world of every-day experience. Even his most fantastic piecessuch whimsical fantasies as Feathertop are full of love for life in its elements, and are often captivatingly genial in mood and in tone. Through this largeness and genuineness of nature, he is for the most part kept even in his passages of greatest unreality from sensationalism or cheapness of effect. The melodramatic is always false, and Hawthorne is persistently sincere and true. Now and then a symbol or a single detail, — the Scarlet Letter, the Faun's ears, Ethan Brand's hollow laugh, may be unworthily insisted But the important incidents and the main situations of a story carry conviction; the reader has no sense of being tricked; he feels himself present at essential crises in the development of human passion, and he watches with never a misgiving, human nature revealing itself in its elements and claiming his pity or hatred or love.

upon.

Hawthorne's prose style is as sincere and as free from meretriciousness as the moods and effects it conveys. It disdains or never thinks of smartness and eschews epigram. It has none of the finical prettiness and unusualness of phrase that modern writers affect. It is distinctly an old-fashioned style. It has a trace of the reserve and self-conscious literary manner of the pre-journalistic period. It has an occasional fondness for literary phrasing, - for words that have the odor of libraries about them and suggest folios and paper yellow with age. It is dilatory or at least never hurried or eager. It uses long, lingering sentences. It leads often to smiles, never or rarely to laughter. It is suffused with feeling. It holds imagery and thought in solution and eddies around its subject. It is a synthetic, emotional, and imaginative style; not an analytic, intellectual, and witty style. It has unsurpassable wholeness of texture and weaves with no faltering of purpose or blurring of lines that fabric of a dream-world in which each of Hawthorne's stories imprisons our imaginations. It is the style of a great imaginative

artist who communes with himself on the visions of his heart, not the style of an alert observer of the happenings of daily life; it is the fitting and perfect medium for the expression of those exquisitely directed and humanized dreams of symbolic beauty and truth which, as has been noted in detail, are Hawthorne's characteristic productions as a writer of romance.

LEWIS EDWARDS GATES