true! Be true!" Perhaps the happiest memories of Hawthorne's readers, as
of Kipling's readers, hover about his charming stories for children;
to have missed "The Wonder-Book" is like having grown old without ever
catching the sweetness of the green world at dawn. But our public has
learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style, taught by the daily
journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational, physical style fit for
describing an automobile, a department store, a steamship, a lynching
party. It is the style of our day, and judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote
with severity, conscience, and good taste, seems somewhat old-fashioned,
like Irving or Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander
to be understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and
Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds.

Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding a fit
audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than dramatic. His
artistic material was moral rather than physical; he brooded over the
soul of man as affected by this and that condition and situation. The
child of a new analytical age, he thought out with rigid accuracy the
precise circumstances surrounding each one of his cases and modifying
it. Many of his sketches and short stories and most of his romances deal
with historical facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of
New England as few men have ever known it. There is solid historical
and psychological stuff as the foundation of his air-castles. His
latent radicalism furnished him with a touchstone of criticism as he
interpreted the moral standards of ancient communities; no reader of
"The Scarlet Letter" can forget Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the
unimaginative harshness of the Puritans. His own judgment upon the
deep matters of the human conscience was stern enough, but it was a
universalized judgment, and by no means the result of a Calvinism
which he hated. Over-fond as he was in his earlier tales of elaborate,
fanciful, decorative treatment of themes that promised to point a moral,
in his finest short stories, such as "The Ambitious Guest," "The Gentle
Boy," "Young Goodman Brown," "The Snow Image," "The Great Stone Face,"
"Drowne's Wooden Image," "Rappacini's Daughter," the moral, if there
be one, is not obtruded. He loves physical symbols for mental and moral
states, and was poet and Transcendentalist enough to retain his youthful
affection for parab