s "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process"--a process for
ensuring forgetfulness of unpleasant things--a modern water of Lethe.
Even some of James's early stories like "The Madonna of the Future" and
"The Last of the Valerii," as well as Mr. Howells's "Undiscovered
Country," have touches of Hawthorne.

Emerson and Hawthorne were fellow townsmen for some years at Concord,
and held each other in high regard. One was a philosophical idealist:
the other, an artist of the ideal, who sometimes doubted whether the
tree on the bank, or its image in the stream was the more real. But they
took no impress from one another's minds. Emerson could not read his
neighbor's romances. Their morbid absorption in the problem of evil
repelled the resolute optimist. He thought the best thing Hawthorne ever
wrote was his "Recollections of a Gifted Woman," the chapter in "Our Old
Home" concerning Miss Delia Bacon, originator of the Baconian theory of
Shakespeare, whom Hawthorne befriended with unfailing patience and
courtesy during his Liverpool consulship.

Hawthorne paid a fine tribute to Emerson in the introduction to "Mosses
from an Old Manse," and even paid him the honor of quotation, contrary
to his almost invariable practice. I cannot recall a half dozen
quotations in all his works. I think he must have been principled
against them. But he said he had come too late to Concord to fall under
Emerson's influence. No risk of that, had he come earlier. There was a
jealous independence in Hawthorne which resented the too close approach
of an alien mind: a species of perversity even, that set him in
contradiction to his environment. He always fought shy of literary
people. During his Liverpool consulship, he did not make--apparently did
not care to make--acquaintance with his intellectual equals. He did not
meet Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mill, Grote, Charles Reade,
George Eliot, or any other first-class minds. He barely met the
Brownings, but did not really come to know them till afterwards in
Italy. Surrounded by reformers, abolitionists, vegetarians, comeouters
and radicals of all gospels, he remained stubbornly conservative. He
held office under three Democratic administrations, and wrote a campaign
life of his old college friend Franklin Pierce when he ran for
President. Commenting on Emerson's sentence that John Brown had made the
gallows sacred like the cross, Hawthorne said that Brown was a
blood-stained fanatic and justly hanged.

Th