n our fingers if we attempt to handle them.
These things are part of Hawthorne's very manner--almost, as one might
say, of his vocabulary; they belong much more to the surface of his
work than to its stronger interest. The fault of _Transformation_ is
that the element of the unreal is pushed too far, and that the book is
neither positively of one category nor of another. His "moonshiny
romance," he calls it in a letter; and, in truth, the lunar element is
a little too pervasive. The action wavers between the streets of Rome,
whose literal features the author perpetually sketches, and a vague
realm of fancy, in which quite a different verisimilitude prevails.
This is the trouble with Donatello himself. His companions are
intended to be real--if they fail to be so, it is not for want of
intention; whereas he is intended to be real or not, as you please. He
is of a different substance from them; it is as if a painter, in
composing a picture, should try to give you an impression of one of
his figures by a strain of music. The idea of the modern faun was a
charming one; but I think it a pity that the author should not have
made him more definitely modern, without reverting so much to his
mythological properties and antecedents, which are very gracefully
touched upon, but which belong to the region of picturesque conceits,
much more than to that of real psychology. Among the young Italians of
to-day there are still plenty of models for such an image as Hawthorne
appears to have wished to present in the easy and natural Donatello.
And since I am speaking critically, I may go on to say that the art of
narration, in _Transformation_, seems to me more at fault than in the
author's other novels. The story straggles and wanders, is dropped and
taken up again, and towards the close lapses into an almost fatal
vagueness.

* * * * *

CHAPTER VII.

LAST YEARS.

Of the four last years of Hawthorne's life there is not much to tell
that I have not already told. He returned to America in the summer of
1860, and took up his abode in the house he had bought at Concord
before going to Europe, and of which his occupancy had as yet been
brief. He was to occupy it only four years. I have insisted upon the
fact of his being an intense American, and of his looking at all
things, during his residence in Europe, from the standpoint of that
little clod of western earth which he carried about with him as the