Are there flaws in the weaving?  They are small indeed.  His didacticism is more in evidence in the tales than in the romances, where the fuller body allows the writer to be more objective:  still, judged by present-day standards, there are times when he is too obviously the preacher to please modern taste.  In “The Great Stone Face,” for instance, it were better, one feels, if the moral had been more veiled, more subtly implied.  As to this, it is well to remember that criticism changes its canons with the years and that Hawthorne simply adapted himself (unconsciously, as a spokesman of his day) to contemporaneous standards.  His audience was less averse from the principle that the artist should on no account usurp the pulpit’s function.  If the artist-preacher had a golden mouth, it was enough.  This has perhaps always been the attitude of the mass of mankind.

A defect less easy to condone is this author’s attempts at humor.  They are for the most part lumbering and forced:  you feel the effort.  Hawthorne lacked the easy manipulation of this gift and his instinct served him aright when he avoided it, as most often he did.  A few of the short stories are conceived in the vein of burlesque, and such it is a kindness not to name.  They give pain to any who love and revere so mighty a spirit.  In the occasional use of humor in the romances, too, he does not always escape just condemnation:  as where Judge Pincheon is described taking a walk on a snowy morning down the village street, his visage wreathed in such spacious smiles that the snow on either side of his progress melts before the rays.

For some the style of Hawthorne may now be felt to possess a certain artificiality:  the price paid for that effect of stateliness demanded by the theme and suggestive also of the fact that the words were written over half a century ago.  In these days of photographic realism of word and idiom, our conception of what is fit in diction has suffered a sea-change.  Our ear is adjusted to another tune.  Admirable as have been the gains in broadening the native resources of speech by the introduction of old English elements, the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth can still teach us, and it is not beyond credence that the eventual modern ideal of speech may react to an equilibrium of mingled native and foreign-fetched words.  In such an event a writer like Hawthorne will be confirmed in his mastery.

Remarkable, indeed, and latest in time has been the romantic reaction from the extremes of realistic presentation:  it has given the United States, even as it has England, some sterling fiction.  This we can see, though it is a phenomenon too recent to offer clear deductions as yet.  What appears to be the main difference between it and the romantic inheritance from Scott and Hawthorne?  One, if not the chief divergence, would seem to be the inevitable degeneration which comes from haste, mercantile pressure, imitation and lack of commanding authority.  There is plenty of technique, comparatively little personality.  Yet it may be unfair to the present to make the comparison, for the incompetents buzz in our ears, while time has mercifully stilled the bogus romances of G.P.R.  James, et id omne genus.