in its intellectual, its unartistic form. The fact that this abstract element really outvalues the tale and its characters is shown, for example, by the lack of interest one feels in the future of his characters, in what becomes of them at the end of the story; they are lost from the mind, because their function is fulfilled in illustrating an idea; and, that once conveyed, the characters cease to have life,—they disappear, like the man of science or the artist of the beautiful, into the background of the general world; they fade out. It is by this abstract moral element that Hawthorne's art is universalized.
His manner, it must be acknowledged, retains provinciality; in the best of the tales, just as in those sketches of observation in Salem, there is something countrified in the mode of handling, something archaic and stiff in the literary mould, something awkward, cramped, and bare in the way his art works in its main motions, however felicitous in word and fall is the garment of prose as language. There is a lack of urban ease, certainty, and perfection of manner. The limitation, however, stops there. The world in which the artist works is the universal world of man's nature, just as much as is Shakespeare's. He escapes from provincialism here, in the substance, because he was a New Englander, not in spite of that fact; for the spirituality which is the central fact of New England life itself escapes from provincialism, being a pure expression of that
