In "The Marble Faun", he says of Miriam :

The more her secret struggled and fought to be told the more certain would it be a change of former relations that had subsisted between herself and the friend to whom she might reveal it. Unless he could give her all the sympathy and just the kind of sympathy that the occasion required Miriam would hate him by-and-by, and herself still more if he let her speak3.

V

"The House of the Seven Gables" (1851) was written in about five months. Hawthorne himself thought it had more merit than "The Scarlet Letter", though it would not make so much noise; but an author usually looks upon his last child as the best.

It is a sombre story of sin and its punishment. Whipple says:

In his long and patient brooding over the spiritual phenomena of Puritan life, it is apparent to the least spiritual observer that he has imbibed a deep antipathy to the Puritanic ideal of character; but it is no less apparent that his intellect and imagination have been strangely fascinated by the Puritan idea of justice. His brain has been subtly infected by the Puritanic conception of Law, without being warmed by the Puritanic faith in Grace.

An Incorporator of Brook Farm 201

Mr. Upham, who was chiefly concerned with turning him out of the custom house, is the Dr. Pyncheon of this story.

There he stands for all time; subtle, smooth, cruel, unscrupulous; perfectly recognizable to those who knew his real character, but so modified as to outward guise that no one who had met him merely as an acquaintance would have suspected his identity1.

VI

Ellery Channing considered the "Blithedale Romance" (1852) the best of his stories, and it is said that this was Hawthorne's own final judgment. It dealt with Brook Farm, where the incorporators with the number of shares at $500 each, were the following:

Margaret Fuller, Emerson, Channing, Theodore Parker, Orestes A. Brownson, James Walker, Bronson Alcott, and others were frequent visitors but not members*5.

* See the Atlantic Monthly, 1878; Old and New, Feb., Apr., Sept., 1891; May, 1872.

Hawthorne was here only a short time in 1842, and the enthusiasm with which he entered upon the manual work soon evaporated. In the romance he has in Zenobia pictured Margaret Fuller, and in Miles Coverdale he has evidently himself in mind.

VII

His "French and Italian Note Books " read in connection with "The Marble Faun" (1860), his last great romance, cast much light upon his manner of workmanship.

His first thought of the marble faun as the subject of a romance occurred to him not in the Capitol but in looking upon a copy of the statue in the Borghese casino.

Afterwards he comes back to the Capitol and says:

This race of fauns was the most delightful of all that antiquity imagined. It seems to me that a story with all sorts of fun and pathos in it, might be contrived on the idea of their species having become intermingled with the human race; a family with the faun blood in them, having prolonged itself from the classic era until our own days2.

The description of the statue in the romance is almost a word for word reproduc

The Marble Faun

203

tion of that in the note-books, even to a slight error respecting the position of the left arm1, and Hilda's tower, the castle, the discovered statue, and all the background of the story come from descriptions already entered. A little sculptured hand shown him by Hiram Powers became the treasure Kenyon so cherished. The description of Miriam is that of a beautiful Jewess who sat beside him at a dinner given by the Lord Mayor of London; her studio is reproduced from that of C. G. Thompson, an artist then living in Rome.

VIII

The narrative is like his other stories always reflective; thus he says:

The city bustle which is heard even in Rome, the rumble of wheels over the uncomfortable paving-stones, the hard, harsh cries re-échoing in the high and narrow streets, grow faint and die away ; as the turmoil of the world will always die if we set our faces to climb heavenwards.

Its text is found in this passage:

Is it not repeated

And may we folWas that very sin

The story of the fall of man. in our romance of Monte Beni? low the analogy yet farther? into which Adam precipitated himself and all his

race was it the destined means by which, over a long pathway of toil and sorrow, we are to attain a higher, brighter, and profounder happiness than our last birthright gave? Will not this idea account for the permitted existence of sin, as no other theory cans?

IX

One of the problems of the book is Hilda's desertion of Miriam. Miriam says to her:

When a human being has chosen a friend out of all the world it is only some faithlessness between themselves, rendering true intercourse impossible, that can justify either friend in severing the bond. Have I deceived you? Then cast me off. Have I wronged you personally? Then forgive me if you can. But have I sinned against God and man, and deeply sinned? Then be more my friend than ever; for I need you more.

Hilda replies:

If I were one of God's angels with a nature incapable of stain and garments that could never be spotted, I would keep ever at your side and try to lead you upward; but I am a poor lonely girl, whom God has set here in an evil world and given her only a white robe, and bid her wear it back to him as white as when she put it on. therefore, Miriam, before it is too late, I mean to put faith in this awful heart-quake, which warns me henceforth to avoid you.

* * *

And,