"Tall, compacted figure, ably strung,

To urge the Indian chase, or point the way."

One can imagine any amount of positive energy that of Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance- as included within a small physical frame. But the selfcontained purpose of Hawthorne, the large resources, the waiting power these seem to the imagination to imply an ample basis of physical life; and certainly his stately and noble port is inseparable, in my memory, from these characteristics. Again I met Hawthorne at one of the sessions of a short-lived literary club; and I recall the imperturbable dignity and patience with which he sat through a vexatious discussion, whose details seemed as much dwarfed by his presence as if he had been a statue of Olympian Zeus.

The events of his life may be briefly given. He was born in Salem, July 4, 1804, of an old Salem family. One of his ancestors was a judge in some of the famous witch trials, and had, according to tradition, brought a curse upon his descendants by his severity. Born of such stock, and bred in such surroundings, it is no wonder that Hawthorne became early the romantic interpreter of that sombre code and mode of living which we call Puritanism. His boyhood was given more to general reading than to study. He graduated from Bowdoin, with Longfellow, in 1825, and spent twelve quiet years at Salem writing and rewriting; publishing little, and that through the most inconspicuous channels: becoming, in short, as he said, "the obscurest man of letters in America." Not until the publication of Twice-Told Tales (1837) did he obtain recognition. A brief residence in the Brook Farm community gave him the materials for The Blithedale Romance. In 1841 he was married, and settled in the Old Manse at Concord,

which, some years later, he made famous in Mosses from an Old Manse. He afterwards held a post in the Salem Custom House for three years; during which period he wrote little, but The Scarlet Letter gradually took shape in his mind. It was published in 1850, to be followed during the two succeeding years by The House of the Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance. Then followed seven years in Europe, four of them at the Liverpool consulate, and, as a result, his last great romance, The Marble Faun. He died May 19, 1864.

Hawthorne we all agree to be the greatest American imaginative prose writer; and his place in the literature of our tongue becomes every day more sure. If his genius matured slowly, it did really mature. His notebooks are frequently commonplace; probably because his art was massive and deliberate, and he had no faculty for spinning delight out of next to nothing. His personality, too, was of a subtlety and remoteness which could not be interpreted colloquially; perhaps it was only in his rarest creative moments that the man was intimate with himself. Of the originality of his best work we do, at all events, feel more certain than we can of any other American's; and this because its unique quality consists not in queerness or cleverness, but in the reflection of a strong and sane and whole: personality. Dickens and Bulwer and Thackeray were among Hawthorne's contemporary English novelists, but he has far less in common with any of them than they have with each other, either in manner or in spirit. Hawthorne's work was, in fact, the product of two principal impulses: reaching toward the moral intensity of old New England Puritanism, and toward the spiritual subtlety of modern New England Transcendentalism. But he is not finally to be classified either as

Puritan or Transcendentalist, for all the elements of his nature were fused as they can be only in the great artist; and it is as an artist in the largest sense of the word that Hawthorne is likely to be known.

One of the most characteristic of his literary methods is his habitual use of guarded under-statements and veiled hints. It is not a sign of weakness, but of conscious strength, when he qualifies his statements, takes you into his counsels, offers hypotheses, as, "May it not have been?" or, "Shall we not rather say?" and sometimes, like a conjurer, urges particularly upon you the card he does not intend you to accept. He seems not quite to know whether Arthur Dimmesdale really had a fiery scar on his breast, or whether Donatello had furry ears, or what finally became of Miriam and her lover. He will gladly share with you any information he possesses, and, indeed, has several valuable hints to offer; but that is all. The result is, that you place yourself by his side to look with him at his characters, and gradually share with him the conviction that they must be real. Then, when he has you in his possession, he leaves you to discover the profound spiritual truth involved in the story.

For all these merits Hawthorne paid one high and inexorable penalty the utter absence of all immediate or dazzling success. His publisher, Goodrich, tells us in his Recollections, that Hawthorne and Willis began to write together in the Token, in 1827, and that the now forgotten Willis "rose rapidly to fame," while Hawthorne's writings "did not attract the slightest attention." Goodrich testifies that it was almost impossible to find a publisher for Twice-Told Tales in 1837, and I can myself remember how limited a circle

greeted the reprint in the enlarged edition of 1841. When Poe, about 1846, wrote patronizingly of Hawthorne, he added, "It was never the fashion, until lately, to speak of him in any summary of our best authors.' Whittier once told me that when he himself had obtained, with some difficulty, in 1847, the insertion of one of Hawthorne's sketches in the National Era, the latter said quietly, "There is not much market for my wares." It has always seemed to me the greatest triumph of his genius, not that he bore poverty without a murmur for what right has a literary man, who can command his time and his art, to sigh after wealth? - but that he went on doing work of such a quality for an audience so small or so indifferent.

II. THE SCARLET LETTER 1

BY EDWIN PERCY WHIPPLE

The Scarlet Letter, the romance by which Hawthorne first forced himself on the popular mind as a genius of the first class, was but the expansion of an idea expressed in three sentences, written twenty years before its appearance, in the little sketch of Endicott and the Cross, which is included in the collection of Twice-Told Tales. But The Scarlet Letter exhibited in startling distinctness all the resources of Hawthorne's peculiar mind; and even more than Scott's Bride of Lammermoor it touches the lowest depths of tragic woe and passion so deep, indeed, that the representation becomes at times almost ghastly. If Jonathan Edwards, turned romancer, had dramatized his sermon on Sinners in the Hand of an Angry God, he could not have written a more terrific story of guilt and retribu1 From American Literature and Other Papers.

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tion than The Scarlet Letter. The pitiless intellectual analysis of the emotions of guilty souls is pushed so far that the reader, after being compelled to sympathize with the Puritanic notion of Law, sighs for some appearance of the consoling Puritanic doctrine of Grace. Hawthorne, in fact, was a patient observer of the operation of spiritual laws, and relentless in recording the results of his observations. Most readers of romances are ravenous for external events; they demand that the heroes and heroines shall be swift in thought, confident in decision, rapid in act. In Hawthorne's novels the events occur in the hearts and minds of his characters, and our attention is fastened on the ecstasies or agonies of individual souls rather than on outward acts and incidents; at least, the latter appear trivial in comparison with the inward mental states they imperfectly express. Carlyle says that real genius in characterization consists in developing character from "within outward."

Hawthorne's mental sight in discerning souls is marvellously penetrating and accurate, but he finds it so difficult to give them an adequate physical embodi ment that their very flesh is spiritualized, and appears to be brought into the representation only to give a kind of phantasmal form to purely mental conceptions. These souls, while intensely realized as individuals, are, however, mere puppets in the play of the spiritual forces and laws behind them, and while seemingly gifted with will, even to the extent of indulging in all the caprices of wilfulness, they drift to their doom with the certainty of fate. In this twofold power of insight into souls, and of the spiritual laws which regulate both the natural action and morbid aberrations of souls, Hawthorne is so incomparably great that in