sy to believe it, and it would be difficult
to perceive why the privilege should have been denied to a young man
of genius and culture, who was very good-looking (Hawthorne must have
been in these days, judging by his appearance later in life, a
strikingly handsome fellow), and whose American pedigree was virtually
as long as the longest they could show. But in fact Hawthorne appears
to have ignored the good society of his native place almost
completely; no echo of its conversation is to be found in his tales or
his journals. Such an echo would possibly not have been especially
melodious, and if we regret the shyness and stiffness, the reserve,
the timidity, the suspicion, or whatever it was, that kept him from
knowing what there was to be known, it is not because we have any very
definite assurance that his gains would have been great. Still, since
a beautiful writer was growing up in Salem, it is a pity that he
should not have given himself a chance to commemorate some of the
types that flourished in the richest soil of the place. Like almost
all people who possess in a strong degree the storytelling faculty,
Hawthorne had a democratic strain in his composition and a relish for
the commoner stuff of human nature. Thoroughly American in all ways,
he was in none more so than in the vagueness of his sense of social
distinctions and his readiness to forget them if a moral or
intellectual sensation were to be gained by it. He liked to fraternise
with plain people, to take them on their own terms, and put himself if
possible into their shoes. His Note-Books, and even his tales, are
full of evidence of this easy and natural feeling about all his
unconventional fellow-mortals--this imaginative interest and
contemplative curiosity--and it sometimes takes the most charming and
graceful forms. Commingled as it is with his own subtlety and
delicacy, his complete exemption from vulgarity, it is one of the
points in his character which his reader comes most to appreciate--that
reader I mean for whom he is not as for some few, a dusky and malarious
genius.

But even if he had had, personally, as many pretensions as he had few,
he must in the nature of things have been more or less of a consenting
democrat, for democracy was the very key-stone of the simple social
structure in which he played his part. The air of his journals and his
tales alike are full of the genuine democratic feeling. This feeling
has by no means passed out of N