An exception will scarcely be made in the interest of Richard
Cumberland, who, as Scott says, "has occasionally . . . become
disgusting, when he meant to be humorous." Already Walpole had begun the
new "Gothic romance," and the "Castle of Otranto," with Miss Burney's
novels, was to lead up to Mrs. Radcliffe and Scott, to Miss Edgeworth and
Miss Austen.

CHAPTER X: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE

Sainte-Beuve says somewhere that it is impossible to speak of "The German
Classics." Perhaps he would not have allowed us to talk of the American
classics. American literature is too nearly contemporary. Time has not
tried it. But, if America possesses a classic author (and I am not
denying that she may have several), that author is decidedly Hawthorne.
His renown is unimpeached: his greatness is probably permanent, because
he is at once such an original and personal genius, and such a judicious
and determined artist.

Hawthorne did not set himself to "compete with life." He did not make
the effort--the proverbially tedious effort--to say everything. To his
mind, fiction was not a mirror of commonplace persons, and he was not the
analyst of the minutest among their ordinary emotions. Nor did he make a
moral, or social, or political purpose the end and aim of his art. Moral
as many of his pieces naturally are, we cannot call them didactic. He
did not expect, nor intend, to better people by them. He drew the Rev.
Arthur Dimmesdale without hoping that his Awful Example would persuade
readers to "make a clean breast" of their iniquities and their secrets.
It was the moral situation that interested him, not the edifying effect
of his picture of that situation upon the minds of novel-readers.

He set himself to write Romance, with a definite idea of what Romance-
writing should be; "to dream strange things, and make them look like
truth." Nothing can be more remote from the modern system of reporting
commonplace things, in the hope that they will read like truth. As all
painters must do, according to good traditions, he selected a subject,
and then placed it in a deliberately arranged light--not in the full
glare of the noonday sun, and in the disturbances of wind, and weather,
and cloud. Moonshine filling a familiar chamber, and making it
unfamiliar, moonshine mixed with the "faint ruddiness on walls and
ceiling" of fire, was the light, or a clear brown twilight was the light
by which he chose to work. So he tells us