as an ideal portrait-painter. He does not, mances." His personages do not generally like Thackeray, sketch so many representa- come before us with that force and air of tive characters, illustrative at once of the actuality that form the charm of our more specialties of the age and of the general realistic writers of fiction. They and their human types to which they belong, and con- doings are shadowy, remote, and beyond nect them by a narrative so slight, a train the sphere of habitual experience. Yet all of events so uneventful, that the story seems is felt to be profoundly true - not only little else than a thread to string such pic- what might be, but what in its essential nature-beads on. He neither gives a detailed ture is, within the heart and conscience.

and many-sided portraiture, setting forth, The embodying forms may be intangible as fully as that may be done, the complete shades, phantasmagoria, but the inner life individuality; nor, as is more the special they express finds within us the unhesitating power and practice of the great satirist we responsive recognition of kindred. They have named, a representation of one or two are veritable human souls, though dwelling broad and distinctive traits, that form, as it in a far-off world of cloud-land and moonwere, the key-note to the character, -a shine. dominating phase that gives tone and colour With all this strongly ideal character conto all the rest, but still a partial and one-sists a power, not unfrequently exercised, sided view, which, as it is left to stand for of most faithful and minute realistic painting. the whole, is in truth but a caricature. His For example, the delightful picture of the forte rather is to delineate the most oppos- old "Custom House" at Salem, which in

ing and contradictory sides of a man, in all their contrasting struggling action and reaction. He displays, with the skill, and almost with the coolness, of an anatomist, the most intricate and conflicting passions and tendencies, as these are called forth by some critical event and its consequences. The characters presented to us by most of the novelists who aim chiefly at portraiture are for the most part stereotyped. They are shown in numerous combinations and surroundings, both to impress the leading qualities on the reader's attention, and to exhibit these qualities forcibly and fully in varied manifestation. But they are always the same; the quality may be displayed under altered circumstances, and again with more ramified operation, but is in it self to the end unmodified, and the closing manifestation, so far as it forms an element of the portrait, might as well have been the first. There is no progress, no growth. The task Hawthorne selects for himself is rather the development of the effects on character of some great absorbing interest. Not only does he subordinate the external conditions to the inner movements of life, as we have already pointed out; he represents the play of the mental mechanism less in the typal forms of definite classes, epochs, and localities, than in peculiar and strongly individualized cases unfolding under the influence of special, and often critical cir

cumstances.

An effect of those characteristics of his productions to which we have been referring, is the withdrawal of the whole scene from the atmosphere of actual life. Thus

troduces The Scarlet Letter. How vividly reproduced are the old inspector and collector! One cannot read it without being affected by the sleepy, gossiping, superannuated character of the whole place. The very atmosphere seems somniferous. Or, again, in the chapter of Transformation entitled "Scenes by the Way," his exquisite description of rural scenes and manners in Tuscany, and of the villages and small ancient walled towns of northern Italy. Still, even his most telling and minutely detailed pictures of real life, with the truthfulness of a photograph, and the life-likeness of a portrait, are seen, as it were, through an ideal atmosphere. He sees everything through the halo of a poetic medium. All is real, but it is an old-world realness, quaint and mellow with age. The present is too hard, rigid, and unplastic for him. True American as he is, he finds himself straitened and out of his element amid the newness, the clearness of outline, the resistance to the modifying and moulding power of the imagination, of everything in the New World. There is no hoary tradition, no twilight history, no fabled antiquity, nothing picturesque or romantic. He has no play for his peculiar power. We trace this in his choice of subjects, as well as in his mode of dealing with them. He has a predilection for the farthest back times of New England life, the days of the Puritans, of trial for witchcraft; for old nooks crumbly and moss-grown, rusty parchments, a mouldering rag with traces of embroidery, of which "the stitch gives evidence of a now forgotten art, not to be recovered even by

one of the most pervading and conspicuous the process of picking out the threads; " qualities of his works is their highly ideal for relics of a bygone age, antiquated habcharacter. They are rightly named "Ro-lits, old-fashioned styles of character and modes of thought and feeling. He oftener than once openly complains of the stern inflexibility of modern realities and American civilisation:

"In the old countries with which fiction has long been conversant, a certain conventional

brain, where the light of consciousness falls but rarely, and then only casts strange, unknown, and ghastly shadows; of possible properties in Nature, in wondrous accord and harmony with these dark forms within our own constitution, which so seldom flit across mortal vision, - properties that may privilege seems to be awarded to the romancer; lie latent all around us, imperceptible to his work is not put exactly side by side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to our ordinary senses, yet exerting, or ready every-day probability, in view of the improved to exert, their influence on us every hour effects which he is bound to produce thereby. of our lives. Every object, every power Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as presents itself to him as striking its roots yet no Fairy Land so like the real world that, deep into a subsoil of mystery. The presin a suitable remoteness, one cannot well tell the ent and visible ever spring from the past difference, but with an atmosphere of strange and unseen. Too sharp demarcations enchantment, beheld through which, the inhab- would obstruct the transition from the

itants have a propriety of their own. This atmosphere is what the American romancer wants. In its absence, the beings of imagination are compelled to show themselves in the same category as actually living mortals, - a necessity that renders the paint and pasteboard of their composition but too painfully discernible."

In reference to the locality in which the scene is laid, he says in the preface to Transformation:

"Italy, as the site of his romance, was chiefly of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easilyhandled themes either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic and probable events of our individual lives. Ro

valuable to the author as affording him a sort

mance and poetry, ivy, lichens, and wall-flow

ers, need ruin to make them grow."

The absence of hard outline and broad light is especially demanded by another well-marked tendency of our author's mind, more or less displayed in almost all his works. His pages are replete with mystery, hintings of an eerie presence, tokens of a power preternatural yet strangely in affinity with human life, repeated and repeated till a sense of unspeakable awe takes possession of the mind. But this mystery is never revealed; it is a presence without a

sphere of immediate obtrusive action, into that of agencies that have long passed from view, or have never been clearly brought within the range of mortal ken.

The introduction of these occult and preternatural powers produces no jar; they are not felt to be inconsistent with the rest of the narrative; they gain for themselves an acceptance as not only possible, but true, and in harmony with time, place, and circumstance. They bring with them no irresistible suggestion of the false and superstitious; nothing of what Hawthorne himself styles "the stage effect of what is called miraculous interposition." The same character of essential trueness that we contended for in his most ideal pictures obtains here. This result is partly due to their own nature, partly to the manner in which these agencies are introduced and employed. We do not feel that it is the ordinary supernatural that is presented to us. That, however skilfully managed, would hardly recommend itself to either the judgment or the taste of the present day. Not only is the improbability, not to say impossibility, too great; it is out of harmony with our modes of thought and feeling, even could it be made apparently possible. It is no unnatural creature that obtrudes itself suddenly, inexplicably, into the circle of our lives; no ghostly apparition revisiting the glimpses of the moon; no uncanny dwarf or vulg vulgar necromancer that is brought before us, but beings and influences connected with us by intimate and inseverable bonds, not coming and going, but ever there, whether recognised or not. They seem the shadowy but immortal offspring

form, an inarticulate voice, an impalpable of our own actions, thoughts and feelings, agency. We are kept in remembrance that - of ourselves; or the inalienable heritage there is more in heaven and earth than is that has come down to us from the characdreamt of in our philosophy. We are ters and lives of our progenitors. The

brought face to face with the portals into the unseen and inscrutable. We are made aware of recesses in the human heart and

same absence of incident that we have found characterizing the more material agents in the scene prevails with respect to these; they do not come as a deus ex ma- if worn on a younger and happier breast." china to achieve striking results, or to "The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath overcome difficulties insuperable to mere whatever mask the latter might conceal mortal agency. They are, indeed, rarely himself, was enough to disturb the magnetic committed to definite action. We are sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur made to feel vaguely their power; what Dimmesdale." "Pearl's inevitable tenthey may have done is hinted at as possi- dency to hover about the enigma of the bilities, but they are never caught in the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of act; we are never even assured of their her being. From the earliest epoch of her positive interference. A haunting presence, conscious life, she had entered upon this as they exercise their influence on us morally her appointed mission." The moral relarather than by any sensible means. tions arising from hidden actions reveal

It is perhaps a phase of this power and themselves in a sort of quasi-physical way tendency that guides him to so constant and through the subtle, untraceable, interpeneemphatic a recognition of those secret sym-trating affinities of mind and matter. pathies between individuals connected by When Hester Prynne's husband demands no tie patent to sense, between our nature of her the name of the man who had so and even inanimate objects; of the subtle deeply wronged them both, and demands in powers upon our minds of time and place; vain, he replies, "Never know him!

of the awful and overwhelming perplexity Thou mayest cover up thy secret from the of our inherited tendencies and relation- prying multitude. Thou mayest conceal it, ships; of the transmission, through genera- too, from the ministers and magistrates,

tions, of the effects of human action and character, now slumbering though vital, again - on occasions the most inopportune, or opportune, according as we regard the question from the personal and selfish point of view, or from that of universal and moral government - breaking out into activity, like the course of the electric fluid, appar

even as thou didst this day, when they
sought to wrench the name out of thy heart,
and give thee a partner on thy pedestal.
But as for me, I come to the inquest with
other senses than they possess.
There is a sympathy that will make me con-
scious of him. I shall see him tremble. I
shall feel myself shudder, suddenly and un-

ently ever fitful, defying prediction, yet awares." "Phœbe's physical organization,

ever in strict obedience to eternal law and varying circumstance, - here peaceful and ineffective, there subduing with irresistible force whatever it meets. There is in us a "mere sensuous sympathy of dust for dust," in our relations with the spot where our forefathers have for centuries "been born and died, and have mingled their earthly substance with the soil, until no small portion of it must necessarily be akin to our mortal frames." The embroidered rag that life-long branded her shame on Hester Prynne's bosom, when musingly placed on its historian's breast, while yet he, ignorant alike of her name and life, was idly speculating on its purpose, seemed to cause" a sensation not altogether physical, yet almost so, as of burning heat, and as if the letter were not of red cloth, but redhot iron." "The sympathy or magnetism among human beings is more subtle and universal than we think; it exists, indeed, among different classes of organized life, and vibrates from one to another. A flower, for instance, as Phœbe herself observed, always began to droop sooner in Clifford's hand, or Hepzibah's, than in her own; and by the same law, converting her daily life into a flower-fragrance for these two sickly spirits, the blooming girl must inevitably droop and fade much sooner than

moreover, being at once delicate and healthy, gave her a perception operating with almost the effect of a spiritual medium, that somebody was near at hand." We are taught again that not in the garden of Eden alone, but all the world over, forbidden fruit grows on a tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and that we cannot eat thereof without having our eyes opened to the dark secrets both of our own heart and that of others :

"Walking to and fro, with those lonely footsteps, in the little world with which she was outwardly connected, it now and then appeared to Hester, - if altogether fancy, it was nevertheless too potent to be resisted, - she felt or fancied, then, that the scarlet letter had endowed her with a new sense. She shuddered to believe, yet could not help believing, that it gave her a sympathetic knowledge of the hidden sin in other hearts. She was terror-stricken by the revelations that were thus made. What were they? Could they be other than the insidious whispers of the bad angel, who would fain have persuaded the struggling woman, as yet only half his victim, that the outward guise of purity was but a lie, and that, if truth were everywhere to be shown, a scarlet letter would blaze forth on many a bosom besides Hester Prynne's, or must she receive these intimations- so obscure, yet so distinct - as truth? In all her miserable experience, there was nothing else so awful and loathsome as this sense. It perplexed, as well | as shocked her, by the irreverent inopportuneness of the occasions that brought it into vivid action. Sometimes the red infamy upon her breast would give a sympathetic throb, as she passed near a venerable minister or magistrate, the model of piety and justice, to whom that age of antique reverence looked up, as to a mortal man in fellowship with angels. What evil thing is at hand? would Hester say to herself.

"She wondered what sort of herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs, of species hitherto unknown, that would start up under his fingers? Or might it suffice him, that every wholesome growth should be converted into something deleterious and malignant at his touch? Did the sun, which shone so brightly everywhere else, really fall up

Lifting her reluctant eyes, there would be noth-on him? Or was there, as it rather seemed, a

ing human within the scope of view, save the form of this earthly saint! Again, a mystic sisterhood would contumaciously assert itself, as she met the sanctified frown of some matron, who, according to the rumour of all tongues,

circle of ominous shadow moving along with his deformity, whichever way he turned himself? And whither was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a barren and blasted spot, where, in due course of time,

had kept cold snow within her bosom throughout would be seen deadly nightshade, dogwood, henlife. That unsunned snow in the matron's bane, and whatever else of vegetable wickedness bosom, and the burning shame on Hester the climate could produce, all flourishing with Prynne's, - what had the two in common? hideous luxuriance? Or would he spread bats' Or, once more, the electric thrill would give her wings and flee away, looking so much the uglier warning, - Behold, Hester, here is a compan- the higher he rose towards heaven?"

ion!'-and, looking up, she would detect the

eyes of a young maiden glancing at the scarlet letter, shyly and aside, and quickly averted, with a faint, chill crimson in her cheeks, as if her purity were somewhat sullied by that momentary glance. O Fiend, whose talisman was that fatal symbol, wouldst thou leave nothing, whether in youth or age, for this poor sinner to revere? - such loss of faith is ever one of the saddest results of sin. Be it accepted as a proof that all was not corrupt in this poor victim of her own frailty, and man's hard law, that Hester Prynne yet struggled to believe that no fellow-mortal was guilty like herself."

Sometimes what is at first insinuated as a

fanciful possibility is afterwards slipped in as an affirmed fact. Thus "dark flabby leaves," unknown to men of science, were found "growing on a grave which bore no tombstone nor other memorial of the dead man, save these ugly weeds that have taken upon themselves to keep him in remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be, some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done better to confess during his lifetime." "All the powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart to make manifest an unspoken crime."

Several of these instances are no doubt susceptible of being resolved into figures of speech, expressing forcibly a truth that might have been hard to render in more literal terms; and some of them perhaps were intended for no more. But it is difficult to suppose they are all so meant. Many of them seem to point to something in a picture, contributes not less effectively far deeper than would be left as a residuum to produce the general result. This is a of bare statement, if we abstract as figure peculiar vein of humour, always fanciful, all that is capable of such treatment. The often grotesque, sometimes grim and grisly.

conviction that there really is some such profounder meaning wished to be conveyed is greatly increased by a thorough perusal of the works together. Many of the expressions lose much of their force and significance by severance from the context; and there are many slighter indications of a similar kind which are altogether unsusceptible of extract. The cumulative effect, indeed, of such expressions in the course of consecutive reading is very great; and it is to such a reading we must appeal if we should seem to have made more of the point than our quotations justify: Sometimes the pregnant meaning we refer to is not asserted, but suggested as a probability, or in a query, or as a scintillation of fancy:

We must not omit to notice another feature, which, though perhaps less conspicuous, yet, like small patches of vivid colour

Poor Hepzibah Pyncheon's aristocratic hens "laid now and then an egg and hatched a chicken, not for any pleasure of their own, but that the world might not absolutely lose what had once been so admirable a breed of fowls." So excessive was the warmth of her brother the judge's affected and hypocritical aspect of overflowing benevolence one particular forenoon, "that (such at least was the rumour about town) an extra passage of the water-carts was found essential, in order to lay the dust occasioned by so much extra sunshine!" The Puritan ministers, grim prints of whom adorned the walls of "the old manse" study, "looked strangely like bad angels, or, at least, like men who had wrestled so continually and

1

so sternly with the devil that somewhat of personality. The products of his imaginahis sooty fierceness had been imparted to tion are always contemplated objectively; their own visages." How true a Yankee he regards them habitually in a scrutinizing, touch is this! When one little fellow warns deliberative, questioning attitude. He is a poor Italian boy that he had better move ever inquisitive and judicial. It would thus him the creative fac

Jerusalem; and, as the whole space has habit itself may be partly due. His indilong ago been occupied, there obtains the cu-vidual characters, indeed, are delineated rious and ghastly practice among the monks with wonderful minuteness, accuracy, and of taking the longest buried skeleton out of power. We seem to read into their very the oldest grave, when one of the brotherhood core - so far at least as the personality of dies, to make room for the new corpse, and of any one human being can become the object building the disinterred bones into architec- of comprehension to another. But his tural devices, or of placing the unbroken works, considered each as a whole, espe