practised; and I do not see why Hawthorne should be reckoned to have had
no sight for that which he did not record. With his unique and
penetrating touch he marked certain salient and solemn features which
had sunk deep into his sensitive imagination, and then filled in the
surface with his own profound dramatic emanations. But in his subtle and
strong moral insight, his insatiable passion for truth, he surely
represented his Puritan ancestry in the most worthy and obviously
sympathetic way. No New-Englander, moreover, with any depth of feeling
in him, can be entirely wanting in reverence for the nobler traits of
his stern forefathers, or in some sort of love for the whole body of
which his own progenitors formed a group. Partly for his romantic
purposes, and merely as an expedient of art, Hawthorne chose to treat
this life at its most picturesque points; and to heighten the elements
of terror which he found there was an aesthetic obligation with him. But
there is even a subtler cause at work toward this end. The touches of
assumed repugnance toward his Puritan forefathers, which appear here and
there in his writings, are not only related to his ingrained shyness,
which would be cautious of betraying his deeper and truer sentiment
about them, but are the ensigns of a proper modesty in discoursing of
his own race, his own family, as it were. He shields an actual
veneration and a sort of personal attachment for those brave earlier
generations under a harmless pretence that he does not think at all too
tenderly of them. It is a device frequently and freely practised, and so
characteristically American, and especially Hawthornesque, that it
should not have been overlooked for even a moment. By these means, too,
he takes the attitude of admitting the ancestral errors, and throws
himself into an understanding with those who look at New England and the
Puritans merely from the outside. Here is a profound resort of art, to
prepare a better reception for what he is about to present, by not
seeming to insist on an open recognition from his readers of the