intellectual and æsthetic ones, might well be called the Human Tragedy. He has sometimes been described as morbid, but that is not the right word. His own tone and attitude are thoroughly healthy, though he does not always keep in the sunshine. There is a large leaven of humor in his work, and humor of the most genuine, spontaneous kind. It would be interesting, if we had space, to follow it through such a book as The House of the Seven Gables, from the early chapters where it bubbles genially over the little boy and his weakness for gingerbreads, to the final phases of its subdued yet pitiless play about the stricken Judge. Yet even there it only serves to throw the overhanging shadow of the book into darker relief. And Hawthorne knew it. He longed to write "a sunshiny book." It was not that he loved the gloom, as the term "morbid" would seem to imply, but only that he could not shut his eyes to it.

Beyond question, the one fact of life and the world which to Hawthorne looms larger than all others, is the fact of sin. This, too, is the Puritan inheritance, though he is so far emancipated as to see the sin of Puritanism itself, and in The Scarlet Letter the sin of Hester Prynne pales before the sin of her Puritan persecutors. But the shadows have only shifted -in one form or another the problem of evil holds for him an unconquerable fascination. In Ethan Brand he plays with the idea of the Unpardonable Sin, which he logically enough makes to be the continual barring out of good influences. In The House of the Seven Gables it is the problem of inherited evil tendencies, made into romance by the fiction of an ancestral curse. In The Scarlet Letter it is the sin of nature against conscience, offset by the sins of social and religious creed against nature, and complicated by the sins of hypocrisy and revenge. In The Marble Faun it is the old drama of the temptation and the fall of man. are not used to morbid ends.

Yet these sombre themes Sin itself is clearly shown

to be educative, playing a useful part in the beneficent plan of the world. It does not, of course, lead to happiness, for the suffering and sorrow are necessary parts of the education; but we mark Hester Prynne's broadened and sweetened nature, and we know that Arthur Dimmesdale the innocent would never have attained to the spirituality of Arthur Dimmesdale the guilty. And Donatello, the happy, the ignorant, the child-like, the faun-like, loves, commits murder, and steps at once into the common human inheritance of knowledge and sorrow and hope. It is of such material as

this that the world's great books are made.

His Art.

We have already spoken of Hawthorne's style. Let a final word be said of his art in its larger aspects. The secret of its greatness lies in the fact that it is not something added to the man, but that, however carefully cultivated, it is at bottom a genuine self-expression. When a Longfellow writes a poem like Hiawatha we admire the art, but we know it to be largely mechanical—a thing of much study and experiment. A Hawthorne writes as he must. It was one of Emerson's theories that worthy matter may safely be left to find its own form. Hawthorne wrote greatly and nobly because he felt greatly and nobly. He invested art with an almost religious sanctity. He could stoop to no tricks; he could not even try to meet the taste of the public. He envied Longfellow for his popularity, but he felt that he must go his own way even though he hardly knew where food for his family was to come from. Fame or popularity did not enter into his calculations. He was one more artist who, after Emerson's ideal, wrought in a sad sincerity."

66

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE, 1812-1896

It would be in some degree an abuse of terms to include in a chapter on romance such distinctly moral and instructive tales as the once popular story of The Lamplighter (1853), by

Maria S. Cummins, of Salem, or the juvenile Rollo and Lucy Books which from 1830 onward Jacob Abbott, a Maine clergyman, used to turn out by the score. Nor is a history of literature imperatively called upon to take account of such as these. But they are at least interesting as showing the purposeful nature of the New England temperament--so purposeful that even its popular fiction, no less than its creations of a finer art, moved along sober lines to didactic ends. It is precisely this nature that was brought to the creation of a book which not only far transcended these and all other American novels in popularity, but which rose almost to the level of great literature. That book, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin, and its author was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

It is not to be understood that Mrs. Stowe wrote very consciously toward the end she served, but only that when she came to write she brought to the work all the moral conviction which arose from New England birth in a family of divines. As a matter of fact, her book was produced in a rather haphazard fashion. Her early married years were spent at Cincinnati, where she had some opportunities of becoming acquainted with Southern life, including the institution of slaveholding. It was later, in 1851, when she was living at Brunswick, Maine, where her husband was a professor in Bowdoin College, that she was asked by the editor of the Washington National Era to write for his paper a sketch of slave life. She wrote out and sent him the scene of "The Death of Uncle Tom." The attention which this sketch excited moved her to add other scenes, and in 1852 the entire novel, thus irregularly put to gether, was published. The sales ran at once into the hundreds of thousands, and the influence which the book had in helping to crystallize the slowly gathering sentiment against slave-holding is quite incalculable. The characters of Uncle Tom, Topsy, little Eva, Miss Ophelia, St. Clair, Marks, Legree, fixed themselves at once in the popular fancy as so many real persons. Indeed, the book was in intent more a novel than a ro