writer's imagination, as has been abundantly conceded, was a gloomy
one; the old Puritan sense of sin, of penalties to be paid, of the
darkness and wickedness of life, had, as I have already suggested,
passed into it. It had not passed into the parts of Hawthorne's nature
corresponding to those occupied by the same horrible vision of things
in his ancestors; but it had still been determined to claim this
later comer as its own, and since his heart and his happiness were to
escape, it insisted on setting its mark upon his genius--upon his most
beautiful organ, his admirable fancy. It may be said that when his
fancy was strongest and keenest, when it was most itself, then the
dark Puritan tinge showed in it most richly; and there cannot be a
better proof that he was not the man of a sombre _parti-pris_ whom M.
Montégut describes, than the fact that these duskiest flowers of his
invention sprang straight from the soil of his happiest days. This
surely indicates that there was but little direct connection between
the products of his fancy and the state of his affections. When he was
lightest at heart, he was most creative, and when he was most
creative, the moral picturesqueness of the old secret of mankind in
general and of the Puritans in particular, most appealed to him--the
secret that we are really not by any means so good as a well-regulated
society requires us to appear. It is not too much to say, even, that
the very condition of production of some of these unamiable tales
would be that they should be superficial, and, as it were, insincere.
The magnificent little romance of _Young Goodman Brown_, for instance,
evidently means nothing as regards Hawthorne's own state of mind, his
conviction of human depravity and his consequent melancholy; for the
simple reason that if it meant anything, it would mean too much. Mr.
Lathrop speaks of it as a "terrible and lurid parable;" but this, it
seems to me, is just what it is not. It is not a parable, but a
picture, which is a very different thing. What does M. Montégut make,