not well how to express, that the native glow of colouring in her cheeks, and even the flesh-warmth over her round arms and what was visible of her full bust, in a word, her womanliness incarnated, compelled me sometimes to close my eyes, as if it were not quite the privilege of modesty to gaze at her." When we turn to Transformation,' we are struck by many differences in relation to the earlier romances. The scene, to begin with, is changed, and New England has been deserted for Italy. It is a curious proof of the many invisible ties which serve to connect Hawthorne with his native country that with the loss of the familiar background of Salem and Concord and the forest, there appears to be a corresponding loss of power. The many allusions to Italian scenery and the descriptions of notorious spots in Rome, however admirably they may fulfil the purposes of a superior guide-book, and however graceful they may be in themselves, hardly make up for the deficiency of the natural local colours. Sometimes they strike the reader as irritating interruptions, and indeed the story itself, as Mr. Henry James has remarked, has a tendency to lose itself in byways and straggle almost painfully in inconsecutive paragraphs. The characters again have become more shadowy. Miriam is not wholly a satisfactory creation, owing to the intentional obscurity in which the author has left both her past and her future; Kenyon is not especially life-like; and Donatello, though at times he strikes one as a happy fiction of poesy, at other times obtrudes too much his alien nature. The novel, lastly, has an obvious purpose, and the lesson of the

educative power of sin, whether it be considered as a moral one or no, interferes to some extent with the artistic character of the work. Yet such criticisms do not touch the main value of the book, and it is hardly matter for surprise that to many readers Transformation' appears as Hawthorne's masterpiece. The genius for style is as clearly there-perhaps more clearly there-than in his other works, and the impalpable charm of distinction and refinement rests on many pages of admirable writing. Still, we are not altogether surprised to find that the next step carries the author wholly back to the abstract and the allegorical; and however little we may have a right to judge the unfinished 'Septimius Felton,' it is easy to see that it would under no circumstances have reached the level of former productions.

Dramatist or no dramatist, there can be no question that Hawthorne was a consummate artist. His characters may often be wanting in opaqueness and solidity, but nothing can interfere with the extraordinary felicity and power of his scenes. The personages do not always stand out with distinctness, but the management of the incidents, the grouping of the accessories, the natural background of colour and tone and scenery, and all the 'staging,' so to speak, of the piece are alike admirable. Further than this, the insight into emotion and the perception of the contrasts of passion, though they often appear arbitrary and unnatural, strike the imagination with rare force and mastery. It will be better to select some of the finest passages for comparison, in order to observe the manner

in which Hawthorne produces his effects. Take the scene in The Scarlet Letter' in which Arthur Dimmesdale returns from his interview with Hester Prynne in the forest. The minister, after meeting once more the companion of his ancient sin, finds that his moral nature is temporarily perverted. He longs to utter to his deacon blasphemous suggestions about the communion supper. He is on the point of whispering to an elderly dame who has lost her husband and children some argument against the immortality of the soul. He is tempted to make some impure remark and give some wicked look to one of the purest maidens in his flock, and to join a drunken seaman in a volley of "good, round, solid, satisfactory and heavendefying oaths." There is a horrible truth in this wonderful scene. Hawthorne has merely analyzed the power of mental reaction after some unusual strain of feeling and excitement—a common experience, but one which his genius has transfigured with unearthly light. Or, again, there is the long chapter in the 'House of the Seven Gables,' where Judge Pyncheon is described as lying dead in his chair. Here the effect is due to the contrast between the cold lifeless corpse, rigid on its chair, and the string of humorous taunts conveyed in the enumeration of the Judge's manifold worldly engagements for the day. Take another scene. In the Blithedale Romance,' Hollingsworth, Coverdale and Foster drag the midnight river for the body of Zenobia, who has committed suicide. What is it that makes the scene so powerfully tragic? It is partly the presence of Silas Foster with his utterly coarse

and rustic imaginings, as an effectual contrast to the spiritual agony of the other characters. "It puts me in mind of my young days," remarked Silas, "when I used to steal out of bed to go bobbing for hornpouts and eels. Heigh-ho! Well; life and death together make sad work for us all! Then I was a boy, bobbing for fish; and now I'm getting to be an old fellow, and here I be, groping for a dead body! I tell you what, lads, if I thought anything had really happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o' sorrowful." What a wonderful touch that is! Hawthorne knows the value of sudden contrasts of the humorous and the grave, and when Zenobia's body is found, he does not hesitate to suggest that if she had only known the ugly circumstances of death and how ill it became her, she would no more have committed the dreadful act than have exhibited herself to a public assembly in a badly-fitting garment. Another powerful scene has before been referred to. It is that of the murder of the tormentor of Miriam by Donatello in 'Transformation.' Here the strength of the situation is not dependent on the realism by which the act itself is described, but, as usual in Hawthorne, on the indication of the after-effects. The sense of a sin in which both have participated leads at first to an ecstasy of joy. Miriam and Donatello go hand in hand as though the murder had not only made them irrevocably one, but enduringly happy. Perhaps, after all, the finest single scene of all is the night-vigil of the hero of 'The Scarlet Letter' on the scaffold; but in that the effect depends more on the imaginative vividness with which the

picture is drawn than on the subtle suggestions of contrasted feelings, on which Hawthorne principally relies.

It is needless to hold up Hawthorne to obloquy, as Mr. Hutton has done, for not seeing the rights and wrongs of slave emancipation. It was reprehensible, no doubt, for our author to have suggested that a noble movement had some of the mistiness of a philanthropic theory." But it must be remembered that Hawthorne was a Democrat, not a Republican, and that he had a warm attachment for General Pierce, who had identified himself with the party who desired above all things to preserve the Union. The real defence, however, is that it was impossible for a man of Hawthorne's organization to feel any deep interest in contemporary politics. He had an instinctive dislike of politicians and philanthropists. "I detest," he writes in the first volume of his American Note-books, "all officesall, at least, that are held upon a political tenure, and I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that, and which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my Custom-house experience—to know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or power of sympathy could have taught me; because the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature." Or again, on the subject of philanthropists, in reference to Hollingsworth:

"They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of

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