Christianity in which alone true cosmopolitanism is found, of that faith which presents mankind as one and indivisible. Hence arises in Hawthorne a second distinctly Puritan trait, his democracy. He looks only at the soul; all outward distinctions of rank and place, fortune, pride, poverty, disappear as unconcerning things; he sees all men as in the light of the judgment day. He does this naturally, too, almost without knowing it, so inbred in him is that preconception of the Christian soul, whose moral fortune constitutes alone the significance of life. In these ways the race element, the New England element, is shown; from it springs the moral prepossession of his art, its universal quality, and its democratic substance. This was the nucleus of inheritance and breeding, which together with his temperament governs his art from within, even amid all its personal reserve and its objectivity. The gradually increasing power of these elements gave his tales greater intensity and reach, and was to lift his romances to another level; for what was inchoate and experimental in the tales, in many ways, was to receive a new and greater development in his later work, on which his world-wide fame rests. The tales had not brought him fame; as yet, his audience was small, and confined to New England. He had advanced so far as to seem like one talking to his friends, instead of, as at first, one talking to himself in a dark place, as he said; but recognition, such as he desired, he had not obtained.
