ften good for us to have to make bricks without straw.
Hawthorne, who was conscious of the extreme difficulty of the problem,
and but partially conscious of the success of his solution of it,
naturally complained of the severe discipline to which he owed his
strength. We who enjoy the results may feel how much he owed to the very
sternness of his education and the niggard hand with which his
imaginative sustenance was dealt out to him. The observation may sound
paradoxical at the first moment, and yet it is supported by analogy. Are
not the best cooks produced just where the raw material is the worst,
and precisely because it is there worst? Now, cookery is the art by
which man is most easily distinguished from beasts, and it requires
little ingenuity to transfer its lessons to literature. At the same time
it may be admitted that some closer inquiry is necessary in order to
make the hypothesis probable, and I will endeavour from this point of
view to examine some of Hawthorne's exquisite workmanship.

The story which perhaps generally passes for his masterpiece is
'Transformation,' for most readers assume that a writer's longest book
must necessarily be his best. In the present case, I think that this
method, which has its conveniences, has not led to a perfectly just
conclusion. In 'Transformation,' Hawthorne has for once the advantage of
placing his characters in a land where 'a sort of poetic or fairy
precinct,' as he calls it, is naturally provided for them. The very
stones of the streets are full of romance, and he cannot mention a name
that has not a musical ring. Hawthorne, moreover, shows his usual tact
in confining his aims to the possible. He does not attempt to paint
Italian life and manners; his actors belong by birth, or by a kind of
naturalisation, to the colony of the American artists in Rome; and he
therefore does not labour under the difficulty of being in imperfect
sympathy with his creatures. Rome is a mere background, and surely a
most felicitous background, to the little group of persons who are
effectually detached from all such vulgarising associations with the
mechanism of daily life in less poetical countries. The centre of the
group, too, who embodies one of Hawthorne's most delicate fancies, could
have breathed no atmosphere less richly perfumed with old romance. In
New York he would certainly have been in danger of a Barnum's museum,
beside Washington's nurse and the woolly horse. It is a triu