ero had not been
more mixed up with the reforming and free-thinking class, so that he
might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston
society forty years ago. A needful warrant for such regret should be,
properly, that the biographer's own personal reminiscences should
stretch back to that period and to the persons who animated it. This
would be a guarantee of fulness of knowledge and, presumably, of
kindness of tone. It is difficult to see, indeed, how the generation
of which Hawthorne has given us, in _Blithedale_, a few portraits,
should not at this time of day be spoken of very tenderly and
sympathetically. If irony enter into the allusion, it should be of the
lightest and gentlest. Certainly, for a brief and imperfect chronicler
of these things, a writer just touching them as he passes, and who has
not the advantage of having been a contemporary, there is only one
possible tone. The compiler of these pages, though his recollections
date only from a later period, has a memory of a certain number of
persons who had been intimately connected, as Hawthorne was not, with
the agitations of that interesting time. Something of its interest
adhered to them still--something of its aroma clung to their garments;
there was something about them which seemed to say that when they
were young and enthusiastic, they had been initiated into moral
mysteries, they had played at a wonderful game. Their usual mark (it
is true I can think of exceptions) was that they seemed excellently
good. They appeared unstained by the world, unfamiliar with worldly
desires and standards, and with those various forms of human depravity
which flourish in some high phases of civilisation; inclined to simple
and democratic ways, destitute of pretensions and affectations, of
jealousies, of cynicism, of snobbishness. This little epoch of
fermentation has three or four drawbacks for the critic--drawbacks,
however, that may be overlooked by a person for whom it has an
interest of association. It bore, intellectually, the stamp of
provincialism; it was a beginning without a fruition, a dawn without a
noon; and it produced, with a single exception, no great talents. It
produced a great deal of writing, but (always putting Hawthorne aside,
as a contemporary but not a sharer) only one writer in whom the world
at large has interested itself. The situation was summed up and
transfigured in the admirable and exquisite Emerson. He expressed all
t