his characters as a rule are characters such as may be found in reality, must remove them out of and above reality into the region of fables in order to make them permanently real to the imagination. Dickens turned Victorian England into a myth peopled by goblins. Dostoievsky turned Russia into a myth peopled by goblins and demons. It is not that they denied the reality of the world before their eyes, but that they saw within it and about it another world apart from which it had very little meaning.

Hawthorne was a writer extremely conscious of this second world within and about the world. He had abandoned the Puritanical orthodoxy of his people, but none the less he was haunted like them by a sense of a second meaning in life beyond the surface meaning of the day's work and the day's play. Many of his stories are stories in which, as in Young Goodman Brown, everyday reality passes into fable and back again as swiftly as though the two worlds were but different stages in a transformation scene. His genius turned more naturally to allegory than any other writer's since Bunyan. This is generally counted a defeet, and, indeed, if, instead of alternating the everyday world with the fabulous world, he had interwoven them in such a way that the world never became less real on account

of the fable it bore within it like an inner light, Hawthorne would have been a greater writer. At the same time, it is better that he should have sacrificed observation than that he should have sacrificed imagination. He lived in an atmosphere in which it must have been extraordinarily difficult to stand sufficiently remote from everyday life to see it not merely with the eye but with the imagination. To the eye, there must have been little enough of fantasy in the narrow lives of the men and women about him. "Never comes any bird of Paradise into that dismal region," he wrote of the Custom-house in which he passed so many years and that made "such havoc of his wits." He had to transform his surroundings into a strange land into which a bird of Paradise might enter. He did this by the invention of a sort of moral fairyland, into which he could project his vision of the mystery of human life. He often offends our sense of reality, but he never leaves us in doubt of the reality of this moral fairyland as the image of all he knew and felt about human life. It is a Puritanical fairyland into which sin has come. But, strong though his sense of sin is, Hawthorne does not always in his view of sin agree with the Puritans. He is more Christian, and he condemns the sin of self-righteousness more than

the sins of the flesh. Even so, his imagination is very close to that of the Puritans, who believed in witches and in men possessed by the Devil. The difference is that Hawthorne was inclined to believe that the good church-going people were also witches and men possessed by the Devil. Unless I misunderstand Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne is here telling us how he was tempted to believe this, and reproaching himself for having given way to temptation. In The Scarlet Letter, the egoism of the vengeful husband, not the adultery of the wife or the cowardice of the minister who sins with her, is the unpardonable sin of the story. That Hawthorne's imaginative morality had the vehemence of genius is shown by the fact that The Scarlet Letter still holds us under its spell in days in which moral values have subtly and swiftly changed. People are no longer thrilled at the thought of a scarlet A on a woman's breast; they would scarcely be thrilled by the spectacle of a whole scarlet alphabet hung round a woman's neck like a collar. Yet Hawthorne's novel survives-a fable of the permanent and dubious warfare between good and evil, in which good changes its shape into that of evil, and evil is transmuted into good through suffering. His genius survives, like that of Hans Andersen,

because, not only does it carry the burden of morality, but it is led on its travels by a fancy wayward and caressing as the summer wind. He is the first prose myth-maker of America, and he has left no successors in his kind.

XVI

JONAH IN LANCASHIRE

The author of Patience-the other Patience, I mean, not the Gilbert opera-is beginning to be discovered even by the average reader. It is not long since we had modernised versions of his two most remarkable poems, Pearl and Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight. Gaston Paris describes the latter as the jewel of English mediæval literature," and even among those who read idly for amusement it should become a favourite book in Mr. Ernest Kirtlan's easy rendering. Who the maker of these poems was we know not. Editors have invented a personal history for him, but other editors have ruthlessly pulled it to pieces. It was suggested that he wrote the romance Sir Gawayne in his gaudy youth. Then, having lost a child, he composed in Pearl a passionate lament for her. Afterwards, in the evening of his life, he wrote Patience as an expression of his submission to the will of God.