whether it is worth while to seek to know something of New England in
order to extract a more intimate quality from _The House of Seven
Gables_ and _The Blithedale Romance_, I need not pronounce; but it is
certain that a considerable observation of the society to which these
productions were more directly addressed is a capital preparation for
enjoying them. I have alluded to the absence in Hawthorne of that
quality of realism which is now so much in fashion, an absence in
regard to which there will of course be more to say; and yet I think I
am not fanciful in saying that he testifies to the sentiments of the
society in which he flourished almost as pertinently (proportions
observed) as Balzac and some of his descendants--MM. Flaubert and
Zola--testify to the manners and morals of the French people. He was
not a man with a literary theory; he was guiltless of a system, and I
am not sure that he had ever heard of Realism, this remarkable
compound having (although it was invented some time earlier) come into
general use only since his death. He had certainly not proposed to
himself to give an account of the social idiosyncrasies of his
fellow-citizens, for his touch on such points is always light and
vague, he has none of the apparatus of an historian, and his shadowy
style of portraiture never suggests a rigid standard of accuracy.
Nevertheless he virtually offers the most vivid reflection of New
England life that has found its way into literature. His value in this
respect is not diminished by the fact that he has not attempted to
portray the usual Yankee of comedy, and that he has been almost
culpably indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the
variations of colloquial English that may be observed in the New
World. His characters do not express themselves in the dialect of the
_Biglow Papers_--their language indeed is apt to be too elegant, too
delicate. They are not portraits of actual types, and in their
phraseology there is nothing imitative. But none the less, Hawthorne's