s are those who can bring their
ideal world into the closest possible contact with our sympathies, and
show us heroic figures in modern frock-coats and Parisian fashions. The
art of story-telling is manifold, and its charm depends greatly upon the
infinite variety of its applications. And yet, for that very reason,
there are moods in which one wishes that the modern story-teller would
more frequently lead us away from the commonplace region of newspapers
and railways to regions where the imagination can have fair play.
Hawthorne is one of the few eminent writers to whose guidance we may in
such moods most safely entrust ourselves; and it is tempting to ask,
what was the secret of his success? The effort, indeed, to investigate
the materials from which some rare literary flavour is extracted is
seldom satisfactory. We are reminded of the automaton chess-player who
excited the wonder of the last generation. The showman, like the critic,
laid bare his inside, and displayed all the cunning wheels and cogs and
cranks by which his motions were supposed to be regulated. Yet, after
all, the true secret was that there was a man inside the machine. Some
such impression is often made by the most elaborate demonstrations of
literary anatomists. We have been mystified, not really entrusted with
any revelation. And yet, with this warning as to the probable success of
our examination, let us try to determine some of the peculiarities to
which Hawthorne owes this strange power of bringing poetry out of the
most unpromising materials.

In the first place, then, he had the good fortune to be born in the most
prosaic of all countries--the most prosaic, that is, in external
appearance, and even in the superficial character of its inhabitants.
Hawthorne himself reckoned this as an advantage, though in a very
different sense from that in which we are speaking. It was as a patriot,
and not as an artist, that he congratulated himself on his American
origin. There is a humorous struggle between his sense of the rawness
and ugliness of his native land and the dogged patriotism befitting a
descendant of the genuine New England Puritans. Hawthorne the novelist
writhes at the discords which torture his delicate sensibilities at
every step; but instantly Hawthorne the Yankee protests that the very
faults are symptomatic of excellence. He is like a sensitive mother,
unable to deny that her awkward hobbledehoy of a son offends against the
proprieties,