social details in a manner characteristic of Hawthorne. Colonel Higginson also believed that Austin's manner of putting the reader into possession of two or three possible interpretations of an event was noted and employed by Hawthorne, but this characteristic is to be found in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow as well. What is certain is that both writers had precisely the same method of evocation by the cunning use of shadows, and halflights.

Professor Baldwin, who has reprinted the tale,1 feels that it is "a short story manqué." While Austin's cumulative effect is gained by a series of foreshadowings, each of which involves a different speaker, this seems to me a wise and deliberate choice, as it emphasizes the passage of time in the working out of Peter Rugg's punishment, and enables us to picture the situation from a number of significant angles. Conrad has familiarized us with this method in our own day. That the punishment of Peter Rugg should be brought to an end at last, and that an unknown voice should summarize the moral of the piece may seem to some readers crude, but by his previous method of surmise, the author has cunningly pre1 American Short Stories, 1904, pp. 61-95.

pared us for this coda, which quietly rounds off the piece. Hawthorne noted the effect of this unknown figure passing judgment, and employed it later in The Gray Champion and in Howe's Masquerade.

The most memorable among Austin's other stories are The Late Joseph Natterstrom (1831) and The Man with the Cloaks (1836). His genuine, if slender, gift entitles him to rank as a minor classic of American literature.

CHAPTER III

HAWTHORNE AND MELVILLE

Of

FEW writers whose life was so uneventful as that of Nathaniel Hawthorne have left more biographical materials of their work for the critic. the many paradoxes which his life and writings reveal, none is more remarkable than the fact that a man whose shyness held him exceptionally aloof from men should have so frankly set down his dreams and hopes, his frustrations and disillusions, and shown no repugnance to their publication during his own lifetime. To the psychologist these materials, as well as the diaries and other records published posthumously by his son and others, are invaluable, and offer an unusual opportunity, of which little advantage has as yet been taken, to trace the process of crystallization in a fine artist's work, and the resolution in literature of the personal conflicts in an exceptionally sensitive nature. At some later time, I should like to study these materials at greater length. For the present, I must content myself

with calling attention to a few hitherto unstressed biographical matters before passing on to a valuation of Hawthorne's contribution to the American

short story.

He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1804. Four years later his father died, and his mother, who was then only twenty-seven years of age, began a life of seclusion and mourning in her room, and adhered to it so strictly that she partook of her meals apart from her children until her death forty years later. "It was as if there were a ghost in the house," says Mr. Woodberry, Hawthorne's not unsympathetic biographer. The novelist's boyhood was sickly, though not without malingering, and debarred from healthy physical enjoyment by the anxieties of his mother, his energies were absorbed by desultory reading. When he was fourteen, he passed a year in the Maine wilderness to which his family had moved, and it was here, he tells us, that his love of solitude was first determined. We know that he absorbed at this time the works of Bunyan, Scott, and Rousseau, as well as the novels of Godwin and Hogg's tales. It is not inquiring too closely to observe that distinct traces of all these writers colored his ideas, if they had little influence upon

his style. Bunyan would arouse his Puritan conscience, Scott his feeling for an historic past, Rousseau his spiritual nostalgia, Godwin his wistful sense of perfectibility, and Hogg his instinct for setting ordinary life against strange incredible backgrounds.

The chief biographical clue to his work for the first thirty-three years of his life is his strange relation to his mother. Such utter subordination to a morbid grief, which made Hawthorne content to act as the substitute and spiritual simulacrum of his father, could not readily be conceived as possible outside of New England. The psychoanalyst is only too ready to find such instances where they do not exist, but here is an example ready to his hand.

Before entering Bowdoin in 1821, we find him writing to his mother on March 13: "I am quite reconciled to going to college, since I am to spend the vacations with you, "1 and later on June 19 of the same year: "If you remove to Salem, I shall have no mother to return to during the summer vacations, and the expense will be too great for me to come to Salem. If you remain

1 Hawthorne, J. Nathaniel Hawthorne and his Wife, 1884, i.

107.