e proverbial, and is mentioned by nearly everyone who
writes about Hawthorne. Yet on a recent rereading of James's biography,
it seemed to me not so unsympathetic as I had remembered it; but, in
effect, cordially appreciative. He touches, however, on this same point,
of the effect on Hawthorne's genius of his allegorizing habit.
"Hawthorne," says Mr. James, "was not in the least a realist--he was
not, to my mind, enough of one." The biographer allows him a liberal
share of imagination, but adds that most of his short tales are more
fanciful than imaginative. "Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is
nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of
the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know,
have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols and
correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very
different story. I frankly confess that it has never seemed to me a
first-rate literary form. It is apt to spoil two good things--a story
and a moral."

Except in that capital satire, "The Celestial Railroad," an ironical
application of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to modern religion, Hawthorne
seldom uses out-and-out allegory; but rather a more or less definite
symbolism. Even in his full-length romances, this mental habit persists
in the typical and, so to speak, algebraic nature of his figures and
incidents. George Woodberry and others have drawn attention to the way
in which his fancy clings to the physical image that represents the
moral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of every
human heart; the print of a hand on the heroine's cheek in "The
Birthmark," a sign of earthly imperfection which only death can
eradicate; the mechanical butterfly in "The Artist of the Beautiful,"
for which the artist no longer cares, when once he has embodied his
thought. Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" has every day a hot-house
flower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in her hair or
the bosom of her gown, where it seems to express her exotic beauty. It
is characteristic of the romancer that he does not specify whether this
symbolic blossom was a gardenia, an orchid, a tuberose, a japonica, or
what it was. Thoreau, if we can imagine him writing a romance, would
have added the botanical name.

"Rappacini's Daughter" is a very representative instance of those
"insubstantial fictions for the illustration of moral truths, not always
of muc