ncheon; but it is tolerably obvious that
the picture is an impression--a copious impression--of an individual. It
has evidently a definite starting-point in fact, and the author is able
to draw, freely and confidently, after the image established in his
mind. Holgrave, the modern young man, who has been a Jack-of-all-trades
and is at the period of the story a daguerreotypist, is an attempt to
render a kind of national type--that of the young citizen of the United
States whose fortune is simply in his lively intelligence, and who
stands naked, as it were, unbiased and unencumbered alike, in the centre
of the far-stretching level of American life. Holgrave is intended as a
contrast; his lack of traditions, his democratic stamp, his condensed
experience, are opposed to the desiccated prejudices and exhausted
vitality of the race of which poor feebly-scowling, rusty-jointed
Hephzibah is the most heroic representative. It is perhaps a pity that
Hawthorne should not have proposed to himself to give the old
Pyncheon-qualities some embodiment which would help them to balance more
fairly with the elastic properties of the young daguerreotypist--should
not have painted a lusty conservative to match his strenuous radical. As
it is, the mustiness and mouldiness of the tenants of the House of the
Seven Gables crumble away rather too easily. Evidently, however, what
Hawthorne designed to represent was not the struggle between an old
society and a new, for in this case he would have given the old one a
better chance; but simply, as I have said, the shrinkage and extinction
of a family. This appealed to his imagination; and the idea of long
perpetuation and survival always appears to have filled him with a kind
of horror and disapproval. Conservative, in a certain degree, as he was
himself, and fond of retrospect and quietude and the mellowing
influences of time, it is singular how often one encounters in his
writings some expression of mistrust of old houses, old institutions,
long lines of descent. He was disposed apparently to allow a very
moderate measure in these respects, and he condemns the dwelling of the
Pyncheons to disappear from the face of the earth because it has been
standing a couple of hundred years. In this he was an American of
Americans; or rather he was more American than many of his countrymen,
who, though they are accustomed to work for the short run rather than
the long, have often a lurking esteem for things that