II. THE PROBLEM. I like a church, I like a cowl, I love a prophet of the soul, And on my heart monastic aisles Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles, Out from the heart of nature rolled Like the volcano's tongue of flame. The hand that rounded Peter's dome And groined the aisles of Christian Rome, 30 Himself from God he could not free; He builded better than he knew, The conscious stone to beauty grew. Know'st thou what wove yon wood-bird's nest 25 30 35 O'er England's abbeys bends the sky These temples grew as grows the grass, To the vast Soul that o'er him planned, And the same power that reared the shrine Girds with one flame the countless host, The word unto the prophet spoken I would not the good bishop be. Nathaniel Hawthooule. CHARACTERIZATION BY GEORGE B. SMITH.' 1. The growth of the modern novel has been marked by many changes and developments, but it may be said that its psycholog ical interest was first exhibited in a very high degree by Haw thorne. His deep study of the soul had scarcely been equalled before by writers of fiction. His stories do not, of course, display all the gifts which we witness in profusion in such men as Fielding and Scott; but in their deep concentration of thought upon the motives and the spirit of man, they stand almost alone. 2. Compared with the writers of his own country, there is no difficulty in assigning his proper position as a novelist to this illustrious writer. He has no equal. It is rare to meet with his artistic qualities anywhere; it is rarer still to find them united to the earnestness which so distinguished him. Whether as the result of an inheritance of the old Puritan blood or not matters little, but in him there was apparently a sincerity truly refreshing among so many writers whose gifts have been vitiated by the lack thereof. Admirably did Russell Lowell depict him when he wrote the following lines in his Fable for Critics: "There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare So earnest, so graceful, so solid, so fleet, Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet: 'Tis as if a rough oak that for ages had stood, With his gnarled bony branches like ribs of the wood, With a single anemone trembly and rathe. His strength is so tender, his wildness so meek, That a suitable parallel sets one to seek. He's a John Bunyan Fouqué, a Puritan Tieck: So, to fill out her model, a little she spared 3. That Hawthorne will ever be what we call a very popular novelist is open to much doubt. The habits of abstraction to which he was accustomed from his boyhood had their influence upon his thought, which is not always expressed in a manner adapted to the average reader. At times he appears to be living away from the world altogether; and society likes now what is concrete, something which it can handle and appraise, whether in literature, science, or art. He had a shrinking from the lionizing which is done on trust, that unpleasant phase which has crept over society during the last few years. The principle of giving the highest praise to the man who can play the loudest on the big drum was a hateful one to him. A silent rebuke to the fussiness of the nineteenth century, and to its fulsome adulation of what is unworthy, may be traced in his pages. This man had a strong and fearless spirit, and though he discussed questions occasionally which have been found too high for settlement in all ages, he did so with humility and on reverent knee. 4. Hawthorne had unquestionably, moreover, a strong poetic element in his nature, sublimated by constant contact with the various forms of sorrow. Through worldly loss he came to an insight into spiritual truths to which he might otherwise have been a stranger. At times he appears almost to distrust men, but it is never really so; he laments man's indecision for the right, the evil growths which enwrap his soul, and that dark veil of sin which hides from him the smiling face of his Creator. "Poet let us call him," with Longfellow; but greater still, an interpreter, through whose allegories and awe-inspiring creations breathes the soul that longs after the accomplishment of the dream of unnumbered centuries, the brotherhood of man. The world has been enriched by his genius, which is as a flower whose fragrance is shed upon man, but whose roots rest with God. |