ong, nor anything but a commonplace
prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with
my dear native land." The perusal of Hawthorne's American Note-Books
operates as a practical commentary upon this somewhat ominous text. It
does so at least to my own mind; it would be too much perhaps to say
that the effect would be the same for the usual English reader. An
American reads between the lines--he completes the suggestions--he
constructs a picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice
in saying that the picture he constructs from Hawthorne's American
diaries, though by no means without charms of its own, is not, on the
whole, an interesting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary
blankness--a curious paleness of colour and paucity of detail.
Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appetite for
detail, and one is therefore the more struck with the lightness of the
diet to which his observation was condemned. For myself, as I turn the
pages of his journals, I seem to see the image of the crude and simple
society in which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not
invidiously, but descriptively; if one desire to enter as closely as
possible into Hawthorne's situation, one must endeavour to reproduce
his circumstances. We are struck with the large number of elements
that were absent from them, and the coldness, the thinness, the
blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that
our foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer looking for
subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must
have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser,
richer, warmer-European spectacle--it takes such an accumulation of
history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a
fund of suggestion for a novelist. If Hawthorne had been a young
Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the
same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world
around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure,
however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his
fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various. The
negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his
contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little
ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of
high civilization, as it exists in other