aesthetic zeal "might have eaten out or filed away
his affections." This was what befell Harold Skimpole--himself "in
prisons often"--at Coavinses! The Judge Pyncheon of the tale is also a
masterly study of swaggering black-hearted respectability, and then, in
addition to all the poetry of his style, and the charm of his haunted
air, Hawthorne favours us with a brave conclusion of the good sort, the
old sort. They come into money, they marry, they are happy ever after.
This is doing things handsomely, though some of our modern novelists
think it coarse and degrading. Hawthorne did not think so, and they are
not exactly better artists than Hawthorne.

Yet he, too, had his economies, which we resent. I do not mean his not
telling us what it was that Roger Chillingworth saw on Arthur
Dimmesdale's bare breast. To leave that vague is quite legitimate. But
what had Miriam and the spectre of the Catacombs done? Who was the
spectre? What did he want? To have told all this would have been better
than to fill the novel with padding about Rome, sculpture, and the Ethics
of Art. As the silly saying runs: "the people has a right to know" about
Miriam and her ghostly acquaintance. {10} But the "Marble Faun" is not
of Hawthorne's best period, beautiful as are a hundred passages in the
tale.

Beautiful passages are as common in his prose as gold in the richest
quartz. How excellent are his words on the first faint but certain
breath of Autumn in the air, felt, perhaps, early in July. "And then
came Autumn, with his immense burthen of apples, dropping them
continually from his overladen shoulders as he trudged along." Keats
might have written so of Autumn in the orchards--if Keats had been
writing prose.

There are geniuses more sunny, large, and glad than Hawthorne's, none
more original, more surefooted, in his own realm of moonlight and
twilight.

CHAPTER XI: THE PARADISE OF POETS

We were talking of Love, Constancy, the Ideal. "Who ever loved like the
poets?" cried Lady Violet Lebas, her pure, pale cheek flushing. "Ah, if
ever I am to love, he shall be a singer!"

"Tenors are popular, very," said Lord Walter.

"I mean a poet," she answered witheringly.

Near them stood Mr. Witham, the author of "Heart's Chords Tangled."

"Ah," said he, "that reminds me. I have been trying to catch it all the
morning. That reminds me of my dream."

"Tell us your dream," murmured Lady Violet Lebas, and he told it