hardly anything more pathetic than the account of poor Delia Bacon hovering like a ghost about Shakespeare's tomb. Mr. Leslie Stephen, who admits that Charles Lamb could not have improved the descriptions of the hospital at Leicester or Charlecote Park, complains that the great romancer in his assaults on our ponderosity has been deceived by the image of John Bull-an image that has hidden us from ourselves as well as from our neighbours; adding, "His sympathy with the deep vein of poetic imagination that underlies all our steaks and sirloins is intercepted by this detestable lay figure," and that his dogged patriotism makes him "afraid of loving England too well." This is more than half true, and doubtless in the nation called London there is even more variety of feature and character than in Paris or New York; but it is otherwise in our provinces, and, returning from Florence or Boston to Bristol or Glasgow, we can at least understand the judgment pronouncing Sidney and Nelson to have been somewhat exceptional British models. Hawthorne, like most visitors, resented the hauteur which makes our upper-middleclass travellers the worst in the world. His nearest approach to rancour is a sentence in the dedication to this volume, which, however, is not only excusable, but calculated to convey a lesson to both nations. "Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America, for courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute in the least to our mutual advantage and comfort were we to besmear one another all over with butter and honey." There is, after all, very little in The Old Home that is unpleasant, and of that still less that even trenches on the outer verge of legitimate criticism-the only objectionable passage being one about the physique of Englishwomen, in which the writer is unlike himself. The defect of the book, as intimated at starting, lies rather in the isolation of its sketches and its want of general grasp, than in any, even unconscious, injustice.

:

Nathaniel Hawthorne's influence as a teacher and artist is not likely soon to fade his finest fancies have crept into "our study of imagination" and abide there. Hester and Pearl by the forest brook; Dimmesdale, with the morning light on his brow; the procession of dead kinsmen, closing with the apparition of himself, before the dead Judge; the Cleopatra of Brook Farm flinging down her gage to Hollingsworth; the hideous upheaval of the old log in the pool; the flash in Miriam's eye; the flight of Hilda's doves; the sparkle in Donatello's wine-are stamped in letters of fire or gold on the page of his country's literature, and the music of his quiet sentences still lingers on the ear of friends or strangers. Nowhere is his American historical enthusiasm more graphically illustrated than in the Grey Champion, and the Rembrandt-like procession at the close of Howe's Masquerade. "The actors," he writes, as with a grim Puritan smile,the actors in the scene have vanished into deeper obscurity than even that wild Indian band who scattered the tea-ships on the waves, and gained a place in history, yet left no names. But superstition, among other legends in this mansion, repeats the wondrous tale, that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture the ghosts of the ancient governors of Massachusets still glide through the portal of the Province House." But in the politics of the present he seldom took a side: when he did so he chose amiss, and wrecked himself, for practical influence on his contemporaries, with the Democrats. By his own repeated confession, he regarded the curse of slavery as one of those evils which divine Providence does not leave to be remedied by human contrivances." He had no sympathy with the Abolitionists of the North, calling their zeal a philanthropic mist: he had at least a half sympathy with the Southern planters. He had no clear faith in the future. "As regards human progress," he writes in Blithedale, “let them believe it who can and aid it who choose; if I could

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earnestly do either it would be all the better for my comfort." In the preface to the Faun, he reminds us, as his excuse for laying the scene in Italy, "that no author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. Romance and Poetry, ivy and lichens and wallflowers, need ruins to make them grow." Hawthorne lived to see the beginning of what he could only regard as ruin; he did not live to see his country rising, stronger and better, after a great struggle with a gloomy wrong.

His career is no perfect pattern; but it says, amid the noise and scuffle by which we are beset and distracted, "Audi alteram partem "—the old Manse against Broadway or the Strand. Integer vitæ, he envied no one, he jostled with no one, he never tried to outstrip anybody. When drawn out of his shell he was more disposed to resist than to float with the headlong currents of his age; when he had taken his stand no personal considerations made him change or yield. His example is a protest against patriotism degenerating into bluster, and the literary spirit sacrificing itself by diffusive energy. Content for forty-six years to remain unknown beyond his narrow circle, the outcome of his pensive labour is summed in a few story-books-about a tenth in bulk of those of Mr. Anthony Trollope; but they will endure among the typical creations of the century. A quietist in a turbulent community, an artist in a world of factories, he gained his position because he knew himself and his work,--because he recognised the value of concentration, and calm, as opposed alike to mere industrialism and to blatant omniscience. A wide culture should be mainly regarded as an indefinite enlargement of the appreciative powers. There have been

few Da Vincis and Galileos, born to excite our "wonder, love, and praise;" many admirable Crichtons, who have left behind them little else than the reputation of unproductive versatility. Let each be, as far as in him lies, equipped on all sides as a listener as speakers or actors let us find our strength and husband it. If we are financiers, do not let us imagine that our fiats will dispel all the difficulties of theology. If metaphysicians, the chances are against our being administrators, orators, or lyrists: if novelists, against our being at the same time competent historians, biographers, preachers, and critics. Let us, above all, row rather against than with the tide; and, remembering that "popularity is for dolls," bide our time. These are the lessons of the life and writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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CHAPTER XI.

RECENT AMERICAN NOVELISTS.

"SAINTE BEUVE," says the most popular living American novelist, "wrote upon Balzac two or three times, but always with striking and inexplicable inadequacy." Considering that Sainte Beuve was the most subtle French critic of our generation, the remark is discouraging. In matters of literature, Americans are like crustaceans1 deprived of their shells : they shrink from the slightest touch to satisfy them is impossible. The physical construction of most novelists is similar. They have much of the imagination, all the sensitivity, of the poet, without the elevation, the confidence delusive or real, which makes him rely on his audience, "fit though few," and on a retributive posterity. Like the actor or the orator, if the novelist fails to enlist the sympathies, or to secure the approbation, of the men around him, he falls, seldom to rise again. His or her we must accentuate the distinction in a department which women have made peculiarly their own, and in which they have achieved their greatest literary triumphs—his or her primary

1 "It is," says Mr. James, "I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue them. They are conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family, of being placed on the circumference of the circle of civilisation, etc."-Memoir of Hawthorne, p. 153.