...difficulty in the lack of materials'. James quotes him to this effect: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight as is happily the case with my dear native land. James was determined...

...to The Marble Faun, the only novel that Hawthorne set outside America: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. 27 The 'items' James...

...Beni (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), I, vii. Hawthorne writes that “no author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow of antiquity. . . nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily...

...tried to write novels and to lay the scene of them in the western world. "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land." The perusal of Hawthorne's...

...slavery, his comments are unaccountably obscurantist or heavily ironic): “No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a Romance...wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.” As early as 1832,...

...passages in which Hawthorne depicts himself in this very light. Thus: 'No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case in my dear native land.' And again: 'I have another...

...Hawthorne did not tell his countrymen a hundred and twenty-five years ago, when he described America as "a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity,...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight"? Religion itself sinks or rises (choose which) from the mystical and...

...on the necessity of Rome to romance, because of its saturation in the past. There can be no romance "where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and glooming wrong" (p. xi). Experience torn out of its hcrc-and-now is pictorial, and likewise romantic....

...The Marble Faun, the native land had become intractible. "No author," he declared, "without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a Romance...antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong. . . . Romance and poetry, like ivy, lichens, and wall-flowers, need Ruin to make them grow." He justified...

...projects was not the Hawthorne who announced sadly in the Preface to The Marble Faun that America had “no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight” (VI, 15). To judge by subject-matter alone, it seems plausible enough...