and conspiring environment and stage--just as, in music, the air in the
treble is supported and reverberated by the bass accompaniment. The
immediate, contemporary act or predicament loses more than half its
meaning and impressiveness if it be re-echoed from no sounding-board in
the past--its notes, however sweetly and truly touched, fall flatly on the
ear. The deeper we attempt to pitch the key of an American story,
therefore, the more difficulty shall we find in providing a congruous
setting for it; and it is interesting to note how the masters of the craft
have met the difficulty. In the "Seven Gables"--and I take leave to say
that if I draw illustrations from this particular writer, it is for no
other reason than that he presents, more forcibly than most, a method of
dealing with the special problem we are considering--Hawthorne, with the
intuitive skill of genius, evolves a background, and produces a
reverberation, from materials which he may be said to have created almost
as much as discovered. The idea of a house, founded two hundred years ago
upon a crime, remaining ever since in possession of its original owners,
and becoming the theatre, at last, of the judgment upon that crime, is a
thoroughly picturesque idea, but it is thoroughly un-American. Such a
thing might conceivably occur, but nothing in this country could well be
more unlikely. No one before Hawthorne had ever thought of attempting such
a thing; at all events, no one else, before or since, has accomplished it.
The preface to the romance in question reveals the principle upon which
its author worked, and incidentally gives a new definition of the term
"romance,"--a definition of which, thus far, no one but its propounder has
known how to avail himself. It amounts, in fact, to an acknowledgment that
it is impossible to write a "novel" of American life that shall be at once
artistic, realistic, and profound. A novel, he says, aims at a "very
minute fidelity, not merely to the possible, but to the probable and
ordinary course of man's experience." A romance, on the other hand,
"while, as a work of art, it must rigidly subject itself to laws, and