whereas Mr. James's men and women move within the most conventional limits, dress in the last fashion, and are seen under the glare of noon or of a chandelier. But the resemblance will be recognized more clearly in a curious metaphysical family likeness than by pursuing an uneven parallel. Mr. James treats the characters in his stories, and even the writers whom he reviews, exactly as Miles Coverdale does his friends and fellow-workers at Blithedale, of which he makes himself the chronicler. He analyzes, dissects, speculates; he surveys them alternately through a prism and a microscope; he respects no secret of the human heart or of individual men and women; by turns he detects a deep significance and sentiment in ordinary words and events, or strips life and its relations of all that is romantic and reverend, to a nakedness in which they seldom appear in this complex and sophisticated age even to our inmost consciousness. This similarity and sympathy peculiarly qualify Mr. James to write of Hawthorne: his fine and practical critical faculty has enabled him to do so with remarkable justice and felicity. His theories, whether one agrees with them or not, are full of interest and suggestion, ingenious and independent, yet free from paradox.
To begin with: Mr. James exactly designates Hawthorne’s position in American literature. He is not national, but "intensely and vividly local. Out of the soil of New England he sprang—in a crevice of that immitigable granite he sprouted and bloomed." His Puritan blood and breeding count for more than any other ingredient or influence in the complexion of his genius, "dusky and luminous," as Mr. James characterizes it. To them he owes several tendencies—the absorbing interest in moral problems and spiritual conflicts, the Calvinistic view of human nature—as well as the strong, firm, simple, rigid, rational, masculine qualities (still to make use of Mr. James's epithets) which balanced the dreamy and contemplative disposition and kept the flights of imagination and caprices of fancy in check. The Puritanical training shows itself not more in his choice of subjects than in his treatment of them. In speaking of the Scarlet Letter Mr. James says: "The historical coloring is rather weak than otherwise; … nevertheless, the book is full of the moral presence of the race. … Puritanism, in a word, is there not only objectively, as Hawthorne tried to place it there, but subjectively as well. Not, I mean, in his judgment of his characters, in any harshness of prejudice or in the obtrusion of a moral lesson, but in the very quality of his own vision and in the tone of the picture."
Mr. James, with a perfect sense of fitness, gives the simple outline of Hawthorne's life without an attempt to embellish it by added touches. Few famous men have had so uneventful an existence, and it was shaped more by the man's own peculiarities than by circumstances: his temperament eschewed contact with the world, the collision of events, the emotions produced by foreign scenes, unfamiliar impressions and influences, the encounter of other minds. Its activity came from within—from the development of his genius, the working of his idiosyncrasies, moral and mental. A biography of Hawthorne is mainly the history of his inner life, and his invincible reticence even with himself, his reserve toward his own soul, as evinced by his Notebooks, enhances the difficulty of the task. It had been attempted before, and Mr. James has shown wonderful skill in following a track which another had opened without once treading in his footsteps. He has also shown a keenness of insight, a subtlety of divination, which arises in part from the sympathy and similarity before referred to. In view of these a person who is conscious of no such affinity must needs hesitate to dissent from his conclusions, yet some of them seem to contradict the premises from which they are drawn. He says, in connection with the Puritanic sense of sin: "Hawthorne had ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience: it was his natural heritage. … But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual: it was not moral and theological. … He was not discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and regular victims, who had not the little postern-door of fancy to slip through to the other side of the wall." But when he fled through the door it was merely to find the spectre waiting for him outside in the gloaming, we should say, even as an inference from Mr. James's remarks on the character of Hawthorne's productions. Are not the manifestations of his fancy gloomy and weird rather than bright and sportive? The subjects of his Twice-told Tales and Mosses from an Old Manse, the central and recurring incident of the House of the Seven Gables, the inevitable tragic direction of all his novels, seem to an
