Nathaniel Hawthorne's influence as a teacher and artist is not likely soon to fade: his finest fancies have crept into our study of imagination" and abide there. Hester and Pearl by the forest brook; Dimmesdale, with the morning light on his brow; the procession of dead kinsmen, closing with the apparition of himself, before the dead Judge; the Cleopatra of Brook Farm flinging down her gage to Hollingsworth; the hideous upheaval of the old log in the pool; the flash in Miriam's eye; the flight of Hilda's doves; the sparkle in Donatello's wine-are stamped in letters of fire or gold on the page of his country's literature, and the music of his quiet sentences still lingers on the ear of friends or strangers. Nowhere is his American historical enthusiasm more graphically illustrated than in the Grey Champion, and the Rembrandt-like procession at the close of Howe's Masquerade. "The actors," he writes, as with a grim Puritan smile,— "the actors in the scene have vanished into deeper obscurity than even that wild Indian band who scattered the tea-ships on the waves, and gained a place in history, yet left no names. But superstition, among other legends in this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale, that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusets still glide through the portal of the Province House." But in the politics of the present he seldom took a side: when he did so he chose amiss, and wrecked himself, for practical influence on his contemporaries, with the Democrats. By his own repeated confession, he regarded the curse of slavery as "one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances." He had no sympathy with the Abolitionists of the North, calling their zeal a philanthropic mist: he had at least a half sympathy with the Southern planters. He had no clear faith in the future. "As regards human progress," he writes in Blithedale, "let them believe it who can and aid it who choose; if I could

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earnestly do either it would be all the better for my comfort." In the preface to the Faun, he reminds us, as his excuse for laying the scene in Italy, "that 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 a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. Romance and Poetry, ivy and lichens and wallflowers, need ruins to make them grow." Hawthorne lived to see the beginning of what he could only regard as ruin; he did not live to see his country rising, stronger and better, after a great struggle with a gloomy wrong.

His career is no perfect pattern; but it says, amid the noise and scuffle by which we are beset and distracted, “Audi alteram partem "—the old Manse against Broadway or the Strand. Integer vitæ, he envied no one, he jostled with no one, he never tried to outstrip anybody. When drawn out of his shell he was more disposed to resist than to float with the headlong currents of his age; when he had taken his stand no personal considerations made him change or yield. His example is a protest against patriotism degenerating into bluster, and the literary spirit sacrificing itself by diffusive energy. Content for forty-six years to remain unknown beyond his narrow circle, the outcome of his pensive labour is summed in a few story-books-about a tenth in bulk of those of Mr. Anthony Trollope; but they will endure among the typical creations of the century. A quietist in a turbulent community, an artist in a world of factories, he gained his position because he knew himself and his work,--because he recognised the value of concentration, and calm, as opposed alike to mere industrialism and to blatant omniscience. wide culture should be mainly regarded as an indefinite enlargement of the appreciative powers. There have been

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few Da Vincis and Galileos, born to excite our "wonder, love, and praise;" many admirable Crichtons, who have left behind them little else than the reputation of unproductive versatility. Let each be, as far as in him lies, equipped on all sides as a listener as speakers or actors let us find our strength and husband it. If we are financiers, do not let us imagine that our fiats will dispel all the difficulties of theology. If metaphysicians, the chances are against our being administrators, orators, or lyrists: if novelists, against our being at the same time competent historians, biographers, preachers, and critics. Let us, above all, row rather against than with the tide; and, remembering that "popularity is for dolls," bide our time. These are the lessons of the life and writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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CHAPTER XI.

RECENT AMERICAN NOVELISTS.

"SAINTE BEUVE," says the most popular living American novelist, "wrote upon Balzac two or three times, but always with striking and inexplicable inadequacy." Considering that Sainte Beuve was the most subtle French critic of our generation, the remark is discouraging. In matters of literature, Americans are like crustaceans1 deprived of their shells : they shrink from the slightest touch to satisfy them is impossible. The physical construction of most novelists is similar. They have much of the imagination, all the sensitivity, of the poet, without the elevation, the confidence delusive or real, which makes him rely on his audience, "fit though few," and on a retributive posterity. Like the actor or the orator, if the novelist fails to enlist the sympathies, or to secure the approbation, of the men around him, he falls, seldom to rise again. His or her—we must accentuate the distinction in a department which women have made peculiarly their own, and in which they have achieved their greatest literary triumphs-his or her primary

"It is," says Mr. James, "I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them. They are conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family, of being placed on the circumference of the circle of civilisation, etc."-Memoir of Hawthorne, p. 153.

purpose is to amuse the leisure or stir the passions of contemporaries to edify or to instruct is secondary. The novelists of the day are the successors and heirs of the dramatists : their works are the abstracts and chronicles of the time: they aspire to hold up the mirror to nature: they compete with the occupants of the pulpit, in being the ministers of morals; with the artist, in exhibiting models of manners, or of dress. Finally, their Art is comparatively new. The latest and most portentous literary birth, it threatens, like Aaron's rod, to swallow up the rest. A good or successful novelist has a thousand readers for the historian's hundred, for the metaphysician's one. He is the millionaire of literature, with something of the democratic intolerance for the halfoutlawed, more ancient, owners of the land. His jealousy is intensified by the uneasy feeling of being often found in questionable company, and having his fame liable to contemptuous travesty. He is an essentially popular writer in an age when popular writing is being run to ridicule; and no greatness of masterdom is security that, after his death, his best works may not be boiled down, emasculated, deformed, and sold in pots for a penny.1

The germs of the English novel have been found in the Elizabethan age, in Sidney's Arcadia, or Lilly's Euphues; in the Norman-French fabliaux and chivalrous tales: they have even been traced back to the ecclesiastical anecdotes of the Middle Age, or the yet older romances of declining Latinity; but the real birth of our modern novel is in the eighteenth century; when, first, in the hands of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett, it became a real power and secured a distinct status. When a branch of art is late, sound criticism about it is sure to be much later: the canons have still to be fixed by which to measure the new lines, and try the new spirits.

1 I, of course, refer especially to the late disgraceful mutilation of Sir Walter Scott by Miss Braddon.