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From The Cornhill Magazine.
NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

are but a clumsy comment on part of Hawthorne's preface to the House of the I HAVE always sympathized with the fa- Seven Gables; they roughly express, theremous senior-wrangler who, on being in- fore, Hawthorne's theory of his own art; vited to admire Paradise Lost, inquired, and they are preparatory to the question, "What does it prove?" To the theory, so far as it is a rational question, what do indeed, on which his question is generally his romances prove? Abandoning the absupposed to be based, that any human surdity of answering that question as one composition is worthless which does not would answer a hostile barrister or a Civil end with the magical letters Q. E. D., I, Service cxaminer, one may still attempt to can by no means yield an unqualified as indicate what is for some persons the most sent. I fully share the ordinary prejudice conspicuous tendency of writings in which against stories with a moral. No poem or the finest, if not the most powerful genius novel should be conspicuously branded of America has embodied itself. Comwith a well-worn aphorism, and declare to pressing the answer to its narrowest lim the whole listening universe that honesty its, one may say that Hawthorne has is the best policy. The tracts which in the shown what elements of romance are disdays of our childhood went to prove that coverable amongst the harsh prose of this little boys who didn't go to church would prosaic age. And his teaching is of imbe drowned in a millrace or gored by a portance, because it is just what is most bull, and the more pretentious allegories needed at the present day. How is the where abstract qualities are set masque- novelist who, by the inevitable conditions rading in frigid forms of flesh and blood, of his style, is bound to come into the moved, like the figures on a barrel-organ, closest possible contact with facts, who has not by passions but by a logical machinery to give us the details of his hero's clothes, grinding out syllogisms below the surface, to tell us what he had for breakfast, and are equally vexatious. And yet I fancy what is the state of the balance at his that the senior-wrangler had a dim percep- banker's-how is he to introduce the ideal tion of a more tenable theory. Some cen- element which must, in some degree, be tral truth should be embodied in every present in all genuine art? A mere phowork of fiction, which cannot indeed be tographic reproduction of this muddy, compressed into a definite formula, but money-making, bread-and-butter - eating which acts as the animating and informing world would be intolerable. At the very principle, determining the main lines of lowest, some effort must be made at least the structure and affecting even its most to select the most promising materials, and trivial details. Critics who try to extract to strain out the coarse or the simply proit as a formal moral, present us with noth-saic ingredients. Various attempts have ing but an outside husk of dogma. The been made to solve the problem since Delesson itself is the living seed which, cast foe founded the modern school of English into a thousand minds, will bear fruit in a novelists by giving us what is in one sense thousand different forms. The senior- a servile imitation of genuine narrative, wrangler was therefore unreasonable if he but which is redeemed from prose by the expected to have Paradise Lost packed for unique force of the situation. Defoe painthim into a single portable formula. The ing mere every-day pots and pans is as dull to him would have been, as a modern blue-book; but when his pots "Read and see. The world will be changed and pans are the resource by which a hufor you when you have assimilated the man being struggles out of the most ap master's thought, though you have gone palling conceivable "slough of despond,' through no definite process of linking x they become more poetical than the vessels and y with a and b. Though the poem from which the gods drink nectar in epic proves nothing, it will persuade you of poems. Since he wrote novelists have much. It is not a demonstration, but an made many voyages of discovery, with va education." rying success, though they have seldom These remarks, certainly obvious enough, had the fortune to touch upon so marvel

true answer

ern story-teller would more frequently lead us away from the commonplace region of newspapers and railways to regions where the imagination can have fair play. Hawthorne is one of the few eminent writers to whose guidance we may in such moods most safely entrust ourselves; and it is tempting to ask what was the secret of his success. The effort, indeed, to investigate the materials from which some rare literary flavour is extracted is seldom satisfactory. After cataloguing all the constituents, the analytical chemist is often bound to admit that the one all-important element is too fine to be grasped by his clumsy instruments. We are reminded of the automaton chess-player who excited

lous an island as that still sacred to the immortal Crusoe. They have ventured far into cloudland, and returning to terra firma, they have plunged into the trackless and savage-haunted regions which are girdled by the Metropolitan Railway. They have watched the magic coruscations of some strange Aurora Borealis of dim romance, or been content with the domestic gas-light of London streets. Amongst the most celebrated of all such adventurers were the band which obeyed the impulse of Sir Walter Scott. For a time it seemed that we had reached a genuine Eldorado of novelists, where solid gold was to be had for the asking, and visions of more than earthly beauty rewarded the labours of the explorer. Now, alas! our opinion the wonder of the last generation. The is a good deal changed; the fairy treasures which Scott brought back from his voyages have turned into dead leaves according to custom; and the curiosities, upon which he set so extravagant a price, savour more of Wardour Street than of the genuine mediæval artists. Nay, there are scoffers, though I am not of them, who think that the tittle-tattle which Miss Austen gathered at the country-houses of our grandfathers is worth more than the showy but rather flimsy eloquence of the "Ariosto of the North." Scott endeavoured at least, if with indifferent success, to invest his scenes with something of

The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet's dream.

showman, like the critic, laid bare his in-
side, and displayed all the cunning wheels
and cogs and cranks by which his motions
were supposed to be regulated. Yet, after
all, the true secret was that there was a
man inside the machine. Some such im-
pression is often made by the most elabo-
rate demonstrations of literary anatomists.
We have been mystified, not really en-
trusted with any revelation.
And yet,
with this warning as to the probable suc-
cess of our examination, let us try to de-
termine some of the peculiarities to which
Hawthorne owes this strange power of
bringing poetry out of the most unprom-
ising materials.

In the first place, then, he had the good fortune to be born in the most prosaic of

If he too often indulged in mere theatrical all countries- the most prosaic, that is, devices and mistook the glare of the foot-in external appearance, and even in the lights for the sacred glow of the imagina- superficial character of its inhabitants. tion, he professed, at least, to introduce us Hawthorne himself reckoned this as an to an ideal world. Later novelists have advantage, though in a very different sense generally abandoned the attempt, and are from that in which we are speaking. It content to reflect our work-a-day life with was as a patriot, and not as an artist, almost servile fidelity. They are not to that he congratulated himself on his Amerbe blamed; and doubtless the very great-ican origin. There is a humorous strugest writers are those who can bring their gle between his sense of the rawness and ideal world into the closest possible con- ugliness of his native land and the dogged tact with our sympathies, and show us he- patriotism befitting a descendant of the roic figures in modern frock-coats and Pa- genuine New England Puritans. Hawrisian fashions. The art of story-telling is thorne the novelist writhes at the discords manifold, and its charm depends greatly which torture his delicate sensibilities at upon the infinite variety of its applications. every step; but instantly Hawthorne the And yet, for that very reason, there are Yankee protests that the very faults are moods in which one wishes that the mod-symptomatic of excellence. He is like a