concealment, at its agonized admonition, "Be true! Be true!"
Perhaps the happiest memories of Hawthorne's readers, as of
Kipling's readers, hover about his charming stories for children;
to have missed "The Wonder-Book" is like having grown old without
ever catching the sweetness of the green world at dawn. But our
public has learned to enjoy a wholly different kind of style,
taught by the daily journals, a nervous, graphic, sensational,
physical style fit for describing an automobile, a department
store, a steamship, a lynching party. It is the style of our day,
and judged by it Hawthorne, who wrote with severity, conscience,
and good taste, seems somewhat old-fashioned, like Irving or
Addison. He is perhaps too completely a New Englander to be
understood by men of other stock, and has never, like Poe and
Whitman, excited strong interest among European minds.

Yet no American is surer, generation after generation, of finding
a fit audience. Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than
dramatic. His artistic material was moral rather than physical;
he brooded over the soul of man as affected by this and that
condition and situation. The child of a new analytical age, he
thought out with rigid accuracy the precise circumstances
surrounding each one of his cases and modifying it. Many of his
sketches and short stories and most of his romances deal with
historical facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of
New England as few men have ever known it. There is solid
historical and psychological stuff as the foundation of his
air-castles. His latent radicalism furnished him with a
touchstone of criticism as he interpreted the moral standards of
ancient communities; no reader of "The Scarlet Letter" can forget
Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the unimaginative harshness