on Irving is mainly an artist, Tolstoi
mainly a philosopher, and Jane Austen mainly a scientifically accurate
observer. Few are the writers, even among the greatest masters of the
art, of whom we feel, as we feel of Hawthorne, that the scientist, the
philosopher, and the artist reign over equal precincts of their minds.
Hawthorne the scientist is so thorough, so accurate, and so precise in
his investigations of provincial life that no less a critic than James
Russell Lowell declared the "House of the Seven Gables" to be "the
most valuable contribution to New England history that has yet been
made." Hawthorne the philosopher is so wise in his understanding of
crime and retribution, so firm in his structure of belief concerning
moral truth, that it seems that he, if any one, might give an answer
to that poignant cry of a despairing murderer,--

"Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?"[1]

[Footnote 1: Macbeth: Act V; Scene 3.]

And Hawthorne the artist is so delicate in his sensitive and loving
presentation of the beautiful, so masterly both in structure and in
style, that his work, in artistry alone, is its own excuse for being.
Were it not for the _confinement_ of his fiction--its lack of range
and sweep, both in subject-matter and in attitude of mind,--his work
on this account might be regarded as an illustration of all that may
be great in the threefold process of creation.

Fiction, to borrow a figure from chemical science, is life distilled.
In the author's mind, the actual is first evaporated to the real,
and the real is then condensed to the imagined. The author first
transmutes the concrete actualities of life into abstract realities;
and then he transmutes these abstract realities into concrete
imaginings. Necessarily, if he has pursued this mental process
without a fallacy, his imaginings will be true; because they represent
realities, which in turn have been induced from actualities.

In one of his criticisms of the greatest modern dramatist, Mr.
William Archer has called attention to the fact that "habitually
and instinctively men pay to Ibsen the compliment (so often paid to
Shakespeare) of discussing certain of his female characters as though
they were real women, living lives apart from