like Professor Woodberry a few years
ago, we were asked to furnish a critical study of Hawthorne. The author
of _The Scarlet Letter_ is one of the most justly famous of American
writers. But precisely what national traits are to be discovered in
this eminent fellow-countryman of ours? We turn, like loyal disciples
of Taine and Sainte-Beuve, to his ancestral stock. We find that it is
English as far back as it can be traced; as purely English as the
ancestry of Dickens or Thackeray, and more purely English than the
ancestry of Browning or Burke or His Majesty George the Fifth. Was
Hawthorne, then, simply an Englishman living in America? He himself did
not think so,--as his _English Note-Books_ abundantly prove. But just
what subtle racial differentiation had been at work, since William
Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts with Winthrop in 1630? Here we
face, unless I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinating question
of Physical Geography. Climate, soil, food, occupation, religious or
moral preoccupation, social environment, Salem witchcraft and Salem
seafaring had all laid their invisible hands upon the physical and
intellectual endowment of the child born in 1804. Does this make
Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an "Englishman with a difference," as Mr.
Kipling, born in India, is an "Englishman with a difference"?
Hawthorne would have smiled, or, more probably, he would have sworn, at
such a question. He considered himself an American Democrat; in fact a
_contra mundum_ Democrat, for good or for ill. Is it, then, a political
theory, first put into full operation in this country a scant
generation before Hawthorne's birth, which made him un-English? We must
walk warily here. Our Canadian neighbors of English stock have much the
same climate, soil, occupations, and preoccupations as the inhabitants
of the northern territory of the United States. They have much the same
courts, churches, and legislatures. They read the same books and
magazines. They even prefer baseball to cricket. They are loyal
adherents of a monarchy, but they are precisely as free, as
self-governing, and--in the social sense of the word--as
"democratic"--in spite of the absence of a republican form of
government--as the citizens of that "land of the free and home of the
brave" which lies to the south of them. Yet Canadian literature, one
may venture to affirm, has remained to this hour a "colonial"
literature, or, if one prefers the phrase, a literature of