diaries, though by no means without charms of its own, is not, on the
whole, an interesting one. It is characterised by an extraordinary
blankness--a curious paleness of colour and paucity of detail.
Hawthorne, as I have said, has a large and healthy appetite for
detail, and one is therefore the more struck with the lightness of the
diet to which his observation was condemned. For myself, as I turn the
pages of his journals, I seem to see the image of the crude and simple
society in which he lived. I use these epithets, of course, not
invidiously, but descriptively; if one desire to enter as closely as
possible into Hawthorne's situation, one must endeavour to reproduce
his circumstances. We are struck with the large number of elements
that were absent from them, and the coldness, the thinness, the
blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so vividly that
our foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer looking for
subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as Hawthorne must
have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of the denser,
richer, warmer-European spectacle--it takes such an accumulation of
history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a
fund of suggestion for a novelist. If Hawthorne had been a young
Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of genius, the
same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the world
around him would have been a very different affair; however obscure,
however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life of his
fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various. The
negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his
contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little
ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of
high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent
from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to
know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and