His chief works are: Historical Discourse at Concord, 1835; Lecturers on Biography (spoken discourses), 1835; Nature, 1836; The American Scholar (Phi Beta Kappa oration at Harvard, delivered), 1837; Essays, First Series, 1841; Essays, Second Series, 1844; The Young American: A Lecture, 1844; Poems, 1847, 1865; Miscellanies, 1849; Representative Men, 1850; English Traits, 1856; The Conduct of Life, 1860; May-Day, 1867; Society and Solitude, 1870; Parnassus (an anthology of poetry), 1874; Letters and Social Aims, 1875; Poems, Revised, 1878; The Fortune of the Republic, 1878; The Sovereignty of Ethics, 1878; Lectures and Biographical Sketches, 1883; Natural History of the Intellect, 1893; Journals, 1820-1872, edited by E. W. Emerson and W. E. Forbes (6 vols. so far published), 1909, 1910, 1911.

The best "Life" of Emerson is by J. E. Cabot. The finest critical and biographical study is that by G. E. Woodberry. Excellent essays are those by J. R. Lowell, Matthew Arnold, and J. J. Chapman.

CHAPTER V

HAWTHORNE

LITERATURE in its romantic mood, that is, humanity in its romantic mood, looks at life with its eyes focused on distant visions. The foreground of actuality is blurred. When the vision is strong, it sees more beautiful things than the sharpest perception of realism can find in the immediate spectacle which it strives to penetrate, for then romanticism is poetry. Romance takes great risks. When it succeeds, its triumph is supreme; all men come under its spell and the most sullen realist cannot deny it. When its vision is weak, it is the most lamentable falsifier; its eye is dissolute and drunken, and it is cried out upon by honesty and intellectual courage.

The romantic, looking beyond life, turns in two directions, either to a timeless land that never can exist or to a past that never did exist. The typical expression of modern romance is the historical novel, in which the unwarranted fundamental assumption is that life was once more interesting than it is now. Taking a few picturesque historic facts for its groundcloth, romance embroiders pretty pictures at will, childishly indifferent to fact. Realism says: "I will draw my neighbour's soul." Romance says: "I will draw the soul of some person who lived long ago and was more entertaining than my neighbour," or "I will draw some aspect of soul that never

was in human shape, some twist of mind, terrible, fantastic or sheerly beautiful." Both methods are good — when they are adopted by powerful writers. But romance has been so abused in English fiction of the nineteenth century that some of us are heartily tired of it, and there are few modern romancers who still hold us.

Hawthorne is one of the few. If his work is not great, it is at least sincere, beautiful, free from false notes, fragile amid the stronger geniuses of his age, yet thoroughly manly and dignified. He is a born romancer, consistent and never in doubt as to what he was trying to do; writing, it seems, at least in his earlier years, to please himself. He shrinks from life. Personally he is shy and secluded, though not so morbid as to brawnier natures he may appear. His artistic imagination, as fine a gift as was ever bestowed on any man except the great poets, is baffled, even wounded by the rougher human facts amid which he passes his life. The sketch of the Custom House which introduces "The Scarlet Letter" is so shrewdly realistic that it roused some local resentments, but it is quite singular in his work; he wrote little else in the same spirit. His notebooks of travel contain some clear flashes of present reality, yet for the most part they offer the obverse side of the romantic imagination, its disillusion, its sadness for dreams unfulfilled. So strongly does this mood of sensitive chagrin express itself in his reflections on English life that Hawthorne, most modest and gentlest of men, who looked upon social conditions at home and abroad with melancholy indifference, was thought by some of our British cousins to have made a Yankee attack on

the mother-country.

Hawthorne himself was puzzled that

any one should attach weight to his opinions, which are so lacking in any spirit of aggression or even of analysis. He was recording moods. He was aloof from the English, just as he was aloof from Yankees and Southerners. The quarrel between the American states merely deepened his gravity and filled him with silent unhappiness. For the political grapplings of the time he had neither mind nor heart. Neither on one side nor on the other of that great conflict which shook the souls of his contemporaries did he say anything which is now worth remembering. The accidents of friendship enlisted his literary competence to write a "campaign biography" of Franklin Pierce. It is as if Shelley had been college chum of some British statesman and had written whatever it is in England that corresponds to American campaign biographies.

In the preface of "The Marbie Faun" Hawthorne says: "Italy, as the site of this romance, was chiefly valuable to him as affording a sort of poetic or fairy precinct, where actualities would not be so terribly insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a trial, can conceive the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.”

Mr. Henry James seems to accept Hawthorne's view that his limitations were objective, and that he might have done greater work if he had lived somewhere else. When Mr.

James wrote his excellent little book, he had exchanged one provincialism for another in the pursuit of his own literary career, and this explains, perhaps, why he presses the idea that America was not rich in material for the maker of stories. His list of things which America did not have wherewith to stimulate the literary imagination leaves his "dear native land" more shiveringly naked than does Hawthorne's own complaint of his country's romantic poverty. It is not strange that Hawthorne's temperament should be dissatisfied with the life about him, but it is strange that Mr. James, a confirmed realist and analytic critic, should not see that the dissatisfaction was due to the nature of Hawthorne's genius, that he did not depend on his environment or make full use of it. For the most part he simply ignored it. He liked what no country in any era presents in the daylight glare of actuality.

Naturally, one fond of haunted castles, ghosts, and unearthly mysteries does not seek them on Broadway, New York, which is two hundred years old, nor yet on the Strand, in London, which is a thousand years old. He seeks them in his mind and in written legend, the only places where they exist. Every society, new or old, is rich in shadows, tragedies, picturesque and gloomy wrongs as old as Adam. The true novelist sees these contrasts, these terrible depths, and makes stories of them, but not the romancer of any race or age whose favourite haunt is a “fairy precinct." In one mood Hawthorne evidently feels that in contemporaneous and local society there is abundant material for one who can improve it, for in "The House of the Seven Gables" he says apropos of Hol