phantoms was mad. Hawthorne is similarly
ambiguous. His apparently preternatural phenomena always admit of a
natural explanation. The water of Maule's well may have turned bitter in
consequence of an ancient wrong; but also perhaps because of a
disturbance in the underground springs. The sudden deaths of Colonel
and Judge Pyncheon may have been due to the old wizard's curse that "God
would give them blood to drink"; or simply to an inherited tendency to
apoplexy. _Did_ Donatello have furry, leaf-shaped ears, or was this
merely his companions' teasing? Did old Mistress Hibben, the sister of
Governor Bellingham of Massachusetts, attend witch meetings in the
forest, and inscribe her name in the Black Man's book? Hawthorne does
not say so, but only that the people so believed; and it is historical
fact that she was executed as a witch. Was a red letter A actually seen
in the midnight sky, or was it a freak of the aurora borealis? What did
Chillingworth see on Dimmesdale's breast? The author will not tell us.
But if it was the mark of the Scarlet Letter, may we not appeal to the
phenomena of stigmatism: the print, for example, of the five wounds of
Christ on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truth
of Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as a
legend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, on
natural grounds--what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century having
become mesmerism or hypnotism in the nineteenth.

Fifty years after his death, Hawthorne is already a classic. For even
Mr. Brownell allows him one masterpiece, and one masterpiece means an
immortality. I suppose it is generally agreed that "The Scarlet Letter"
is his _chef-d'oeuvre_. Certainly it is his most intensely conceived
work, the most thoroughly fused and logically developed; and is free
from those elements of fantasy, mystery, and unreality which enter into
his other romances. But its unrelieved gloom, and the author's
unrelaxing grasp upon his theme, make it less characteristic than some
of his inferior works; and I think he was right in preferring "The House
of the Seven Gables," as more fully representing all sides of his
genius. The difference between the two is the difference between tragedy
and romance. While we are riding the high horse of criticism and feeling
virtuous, we will concede the superiority of the former _genre_; but
when we give our literary conscience the slip, we yield o