I heard Colonel Higginson say, in a lecture at Concord, that if a few
drops of redder blood could have been added to Hawthorne's style, he
would have been the foremost imaginative writer of his century. The
ghosts in "The AEneid" were unable to speak aloud until they had drunk
blood. Instinctively, then, one seeks to infuse more red corpuscles into
the somewhat anaemic veins of these tales and romances. For Hawthorne's
fiction is almost wholly ideal. He does not copy life like Thackeray,
whose procedure is inductive: does not start with observed characters,
but with an imagined problem or situation of the soul, inventing
characters to fit. There is always a dreamy quality about the action:
no violent quarrels, no passionate love scenes. Thus it has been often
pointed out that in "The Scarlet Letter" we do not get the history of
Dimmesdale's and Hester's sin: not the passion itself, but only its
sequels in the conscience. So in "The House of the Seven Gables," and
"The Marble Faun," a crime has preceded the opening of the story, which
deals with the working out of the retribution.

When Hawthorne handled real persons, it was in the form of the character
sketch--often the satirical character sketch,--as in the introduction to
"The Scarlet Letter" which scandalized the people of Salem. If he could
have made a novel out of his custom-house acquaintances, he might have
given us something less immaterial. He felt the lack of solidity in his
own creations: the folly of constructing "the semblance of a world out
of airy matter"; the "value hidden in petty incidents and ordinary
characters." "A better book than I shall ever write was there," he
confesses, but "my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to
transcribe it."

Now and then, when he worked from observation, or utilized his own
experiences, a piece of drastic realism results. The suicide of Zenobia
is transferred, with the necessary changes, from a long passage in "The
American Note Books," in which he tells of going out at night, with his
neighbors, to drag for the body of a girl who had drowned herself in the
Concord. Yet he did not refrain the touch of symbolism even here. There
is a wound on Zenobia's breast, inflicted by the pole with which
Hollingsworth is groping the river bottom.

And this is why one finds his "American Note Books" quite as interesting
reading as his stories. Very remarkable things, these note books. They
have puzzled Mr. James,