imaginative vision, the great fact of man's nature; the light element
that had been mingled with his own composition always clung to this
rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers
about the mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of
Hawthorne's stock that if his imagination should take licence to amuse
itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan
morality for its play-ground. He speaks of the dark disapproval with
which his old ancestors, in the case of their coming to life, would
see him trifling himself away as a story-teller. But how far more
darkly would they have frowned could they have understood that he had
converted the very principle of their own being into one of his toys!

It will be seen that I am far from being struck with the justice of
that view of the author of the _Twice-Told Tales_, which is so happily
expressed by the French critic to whom I alluded at an earlier stage
of this essay. To speak of Hawthorne, as M. Emile Montégut does, as a
_romancier pessimiste_, seems to me very much beside the mark. He is
no more a pessimist than an optimist, though he is certainly not much
of either. He does not pretend to conclude, or to have a philosophy of
human nature; indeed, I should even say that at bottom he does not
take human nature as hard as he may seem to do. "His bitterness," says
M. Montégut, "is without abatement, and his bad opinion of man is
without compensation.... His little tales have the air of confessions
which the soul makes to itself; they are so many little slaps which
the author applies to our face." This, it seems to me, is to
exaggerate almost immeasurably the reach of Hawthorne's relish of
gloomy subjects. What pleased him in such subjects was their
picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their chiaroscuro;
but they were not the expression of a hopeless, or even of a
predominantly melancholy, feeling about the human soul. Such at least