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 upon. 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.

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

THE PROCESSION OF LIFE

BUT, come! The sun is hastening westward, while the march of human life, that never paused before, is delayed by our attempt to rearrange its order. It is desirable to find some comprehensive principle, that shall render our task easier by bringing thousands into the ranks where hitherto we have brought one. Therefore let the trumpet, if possible, split its brazen throat with a louder note than ever, and the herald summon all mortals who, from whatever cause, have lost, or never found, their proper places in the world.

Obedient to this call, a great multitude come together, most of them with listless gait, betokening weariness of soul, yet with a gleam of satisfaction in their faces, at a prospect of at length reaching those positions which, hitherto, they have vainly sought. But here will be another disappointment; for we can attempt no more than merely to associate, in one fraternity, all who are afflicted with the same vague trouble. Some great mistake in life is the chief condition of admittance into this class. Here are members of the learned professions, whom Providence endowed with special gifts for the plough, the forge, and the wheelbarrow, or for the routine of unintellectual business. We will assign to them, as partners in the march, those lowly laborers and handicraftsmen, who have pined, as with a dying thirst, after the unattainable fountains of knowledge. The latter have lost less than their companions; yet more, because they deem it infinite. Perchance the two species of unfortunates may comfort one another. Here are Quakers with the instinct of battle in them; and men of war who should have worn the broad brim. Authors shall be ranked here, whom some freak of Nature, making game of her poor children, had imbued with the confidence of genius, and strong desire of fame, but has favored with no corresponding power; and others, whose lofty gifts were unaccompanied with the faculty of expression, or any of that earthly machinery, by which ethereal endowments must be manifested to mankind. All these, therefore, are melancholy laughing-stocks. Next, here are honest and well-intentioned persons, who by a want of tact by inaccurate

perceptions by a distorting imagination - have been kept continually at cross purposes with the world, and bewildered upon the path of life. Let us see if they can confine themselves within the line of our procession. In this class, likewise, we must assign places to those who have encountered that worst of ill success, a higher fortune than their abilities could vindicate; writers, actors, painters, the pets of a day, but whose laurels wither unrenewed amid their hoary hair; politicians, whom some malicious contingency of affairs has thrust into conspicuous station, where, while the world stands gazing at them, the dreary consciousness of imbecility makes them curse their birth hour. To such men, we give for a companion him whose rare talents, which perhaps require a Revolution for their exercise, are buried in the tomb of sluggish circumstances.

Not far from these, we must find room for one whose success has been of the wrong kind; the man who should have lingered in the cloisters of a university, digging new treasures out of the Herculaneum of antique lore, diffusing depth and accuracy of literature throughout his country, and thus making for himself a great and quiet fame. But the outward tendencies around him have proved too powerful for his inward nature, and have drawn him into the arena of political tumult, there to contend at disadvantage, whether front to front, or side by side, with the brawny giants of actual life. He becomes, it may be, a name for brawling parties to bandy to and fro, a legislator of the Union; a governor of his native State; an ambassador to the courts of kings or queens; and the world may deem him a man of happy stars. But not so the wise; and not so himself, when he looks through his experience, and sighs to miss that fitness, the one invaluable touch which makes all things true and real. So much achieved, yet how abortive is his life! Whom shall we choose for his companion? Some weak framed blacksmith, perhaps, whose delicacy of muscle might have suited a tailor's shopboard better than the anvil.

Shall we bid the trumpet sound again? It is hardly worth the while. There remain a few idle men of fortune, tavern and grogshop loungers, lazzaroni, old bachelors, decaying maidens, and people of crooked intellect or temper, all of whom may find their