Page:Nathaniel Hawthorne (Woodbury).djvu/164

 purport to be pictures of actual life, we have allegory, not always so warmly dressed in its habiliments of flesh and blood as to be taken into the reader's mind without a shiver. Whether from lack of power, or an unconquerable reserve, the Author's touches have often an effect of tameness; the merriest man can hardly contrive to laugh at his broadest humor; the tenderest woman, one would suppose, will hardly shed warm tears at his deepest pathos. The book, if you would see anything in it, requires to be read in the clear, brown, twilight atmosphere in which it was written; if opened in the sunshine, it is apt to look exceedingly like a volume of blank pages."

This is, of course, the natural overstatement of an author whose work has gone from him and seems less vital because he has outlived it; but nevertheless it contains sound judgment as to the limitations of his art.

But notwithstanding Hawthorne's objectivity and reserve, of which he justly makes so much, and the low vital tone of his work, resulting from whatever cause, he did not altogether escape from himself in his art; his shadow followed him into that world. The "clear brown twilight atmosphere" of which he speaks was an affair of temperament; it exhaled from his personality. That recurring idea of isolation, the sense of the secrecy of men's bosoms, the perception of life as always lying in the shadow that falls on it, proceeded from predilections of his own, differentiating him