of the
antiquated heroine of the story. He wished to strike a certain
exclusively human and personal note. He knew that for this purpose he
was taking a licence; but the point is that he felt he was not
indulging in any extravagant violation of reality. Giving in a letter,
about 1830, an account of a little journey he was making in
Connecticut, he says, of the end of a seventeen miles' stage, that "in
the evening, however, I went to a Bible-class with a very polite and
agreeable gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a strolling
tailor of very questionable habits."

Hawthorne appears on various occasions to have absented himself from
Salem, and to have wandered somewhat through the New England States.
But the only one of these episodes of which there is a considerable
account in the Note-Books is a visit that he paid in the summer of
1837 to his old college-mate, Horatio Bridge, who was living upon his
father's property in Maine, in company with an eccentric young
Frenchman, a teacher of his native tongue, who was looking for pupils
among the northern forests. I have said that there was less psychology
in Hawthorne's Journals than might have been looked for; but there is
nevertheless a certain amount of it, and nowhere more than in a number
of pages relating to this remarkable "Monsieur S." (Hawthorne,
intimate as he apparently became with him, always calls him
"Monsieur," just as throughout all his Diaries he invariably speaks
of all his friends, even the most familiar, as "Mr." He confers the
prefix upon the unconventional Thoreau, his fellow-woodsman at
Concord, and upon the emancipated brethren at Brook Farm.) These pages
are completely occupied with Monsieur S., who was evidently a man of
character, with the full complement of his national vivacity. There is
an elaborate effort to analyse the poor young Frenchman's disposition,
something conscientious and painstaking, respectful, explicit, almost
solemn. These passages are very curious as a reminder of the absence
of the off-hand element in the manner in which many Americans, and
many New Englanders especially, make up their minds about people whom
they meet. This, in turn, is a reminder of something that may be
called the importance of the individual in the American world; which
is a result of the newness and youthfulness of society and of the
absence of keen competition. The individual counts for more, as it
were, and, thanks to the absence of a variety