he confessed that he loved best when “strange”) to the short story, and thence to the full and rounded novel.  All his work was leisurely.  All his language was picked, though not with affectation.  He did not strive to make a style out of the use of odd words, or of familiar words in odd places.  Almost always he looked for “a kind of spiritual medium, seen through which” his romances, like the Old Manse in which he dwelt, “had not quite the aspect of belonging to the material world.”

The spiritual medium which he liked, he was partly born into, and partly he created it.  The child of a race which came from England, robust and Puritanic, he had in his veins the blood of judges—­of those judges who burned witches and persecuted Quakers.  His fancy is as much influenced by the old fanciful traditions of Providence, of Witchcraft, of haunting Indian magic, as Scott’s is influenced by legends of foray and feud, by ballad, and song, and old wives’ tales, and records of conspiracies, fire-raisings, tragic love-adventures, and border wars.  Like Scott, Hawthorne lived in phantasy—­in phantasy which returned to the romantic past, wherein his ancestors had been notable men.  It is a commonplace, but an inevitable commonplace, to add that he was filled with the idea of Heredity, with the belief that we are all only new combinations of our fathers that were before us.  This has been made into a kind of pseudo-scientific doctrine by M. Zola, in the long series of his Rougon-Macquart novels.  Hawthorne treated it with a more delicate and a serener art in “The House of the Seven Gables.”

It is curious to mark Hawthorne’s attempts to break away from himself—­from the man that heredity, and circumstance, and the divine gift of genius had made him.  He naturally “haunts the mouldering lodges of the past”; but when he came to England (where such lodges are abundant), he was ill-pleased and cross-grained.  He knew that a long past, with mysteries, dark places, malisons, curses, historic wrongs, was the proper atmosphere of his art.  But a kind of conscientious desire to be something other than himself—­something more ordinary and popular—­make him thank Heaven that his chosen atmosphere was rare in his native land.  He grumbled at it, when he was in the midst of it; he grumbled in England; and how he grumbled in Rome!  He permitted the American Eagle to make her nest in his bosom, “with the customary infirmity of temper that characterises this unhappy fowl,” as he says in his essay “The Custom House.”  “The general truculency of her attitude” seems to “threaten mischief to the inoffensive community” of Europe, and especially of England and Italy.