ratic Review_, a periodical published at Washington, and
having, as our author's biographer says, "considerable pretensions to
a national character." It is to be regretted that the practice of
keeping its creditors waiting should, on the part of the magazine in
question, have been thought compatible with these pretensions. The
foregoing lines are a description of a very monotonous but a very
contented life, and Mr. Lathrop justly remarks upon the dissonance of
tone of the tales Hawthorne produced under these happy circumstances.
It is indeed not a little of an anomaly. The episode of the Manse was
one of the most agreeable he had known, and yet the best of the
_Mosses_ (though not the greater number of them) are singularly dismal
compositions. They are redolent of M. Montegut's pessimism. "The
reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil," says Mr. Lathrop, "had
been but slightly insisted upon in the earlier tales: in this series
the idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, with earth-shaking
strength, and the pits of hell seem yawning beneath us." This is very
true (allowing for Mr. Lathrop's rather too emphatic way of putting
it); but the anomaly is, I think, on the whole, only superficial. Our
writer's imagination, as has been abundantly conceded, was a gloomy
one; the old Puritan sense of sin, of penalties to be paid, of the
darkness and wickedness of life, had, as I have already suggested,
passed into it. It had not passed into the parts of Hawthorne's nature
corresponding to those occupied by the same horrible vision of things
in his ancestors; but it had still been determined to claim this
later comer as its own, and since his heart and his happiness were to
escape, it insisted on setting its mark upon his genius--upon his most
beautiful organ, his admirable fancy. It may be said that when his
fancy was strongest and keenest, when it was most itself, then the
dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richly; and there cannot be a
better proof that he was not the man of a sombre _parti-pris_ whom M.
Montegut describes, than the fact that these duskiest flowers of his
invention sprang straight from the soil of his happiest days. This
surely indicates that there was but little direct connection between
the products of his fancy and the state of his affections. When he was
lightest at heart, he was most creative, and when he was most
creative, the moral picturesqueness of the old secret of mankind in
general and of the Puritan