he is without the diabolism of Machiavelli. But in reading the Essays we never feel that "God is come into the camp."

Yet how much the great little book contains! The keenest wit, which is often more than wit, keeps us frequently from noting the absence of humor. Better for his aim than the imagination that the essayist lacks, is the inexhaustible fancy that wings his meaning with unforgetable analogies and startling contrasts, drawn often from the life that every man knows. Cool, tolerant, loving nature—especially in Gardens -admiring and envying youth, almost pitying age, searching his own time and the whole past for examples, Bacon urges his seeing mind among the motives, and hopes, and fears of men, with a triumphant skill that makes us suspect him of white magic. Black magic he deals in only at such half-repented moments as when, for extreme exigencies, he excuses simulation. Dissimulation is for him a virtue.

A thinker, Bacon is also the occasion of thought in others. And although the remark has probably been made—I should give you the authority if I knew it-I should like, in closing, to remind you that for most of us, only two men equal Bacon as breeders of thought. These two are Socrates and Emerson. Far nobler than Bacon, the essayist, they are less acute and not more homely or plain. His worldliness is a complement to their other-worldliness. The dignity of his manner is an education for any world. It is a piece of good fortune for ours that he still lives and teaches.

NOT "POOR CHARLES LAMB."

Carlyle speaks of Lamb's "proclivity to gin." People used to try to get away from it, smooth it over. It is wiser now to admit not only that he drank gin but a great many other things, and that he drank too much. Therefore many persons refer to him as "Poor Charles Lamb." Call Byron poor, if you will, who ruined his own happiness and that of many other people; call Keats poor, who died of consumption before he could do what his genius meant him to do; call Coleridge poor, stupefied and befogged as he was with opium, content to live on charity and have his family supported by his friends; but never call Lamb poor. To begin with, he saved two thousand pounds out of his small salary and innumerable benevolences, to take care of his sister after he should be gone. He helped everybody about him. Fielding's earliest biographer says that Fielding's table was always open to those who had been his friends in youth and had impaired their fortunes. Lamb's table during the later years in the Inner Temple and afterwards in other lodgings,

was open to those who had impaired their fortunes, whether or not they had been his friends in youth.

He allowed fifty pounds a year for years to an old schoolmistress of his; he helped not only with money, of which he had little, but with care and thought and painstaking, of which you may find a hundred traces in his letters. You won't find in his letters more than necessary mention of the money he gave and lent. Therefore not poor Charles Lamb, but rich Charles Lamb, saint Charles Lamb, as Thackeray called him, and none the less a saint upon earth because he could not help drinking too much. The failing never kept him from his life-long duty. We may be sorry for it. We must be endlessly sorry because it grieved him and his sister for years. But to blame him were absurd; to pity were profane. Lamb himself resented even a hint of patronage. Coleridge called him "gentle-hearted," in print. Lamb wrote to him in one of the best passages in all his letters: "Substitute drunken-dog; ragged-head; seld-shaven; odd-eyed; stuttering; or any other epithet which truly and properly belongs to the gentleman in question."

But Lamb was important not merely to the needy. His letters, virtually an autobiography, are a record of great friendships and friendships with great men. The fame of his talk with them will never die. "No one," says Hazlitt, "ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen half-sentences as he does. His jests scald like tears; and he probes a question with a play upon words."

Moreover, one cannot well condescend to a man who, although he was full of whims and pranks, of melancholy, and wild gaiety, was in essence as sensible as Ben Franklin. And his letters run the whole gamut.

HAWTHORNE'S INHERITANCE AND HIS ART

Honest, hearty, external romance is not for Hawthorne. His heart is not with Nathan Hale, or with Paul Revere on his ride, or with Wolfe taking the Heights of Abraham, and conquering the foe who courted death with the high chivalry of Sidney. Incident is not unimportant with Hawthorne, but it is important chiefly as the outward, bodily sign of the inward and moral drama. And if young readers (and all other readers) of Hawthorne would grasp this cardinal fact of his genius, they would cease demanding from him "action," in the conventional sense, and several other elements, to be noted anon, which, though in themselves admirable and to be desired, the author of "The Scarlet Letter" has not found indispensable to his unique endeavor.

In apparent contradiction to what has just been said, Hawthorne is often spoken of as if he were the historical novelist of New England, annalist-in-ordinary to "the old thirteen." In letter, nothing could be more false in spirit, nothing more true. All that most of us know of the life of our ancestors resolves itself into a kind of tableau, intermittently present to the inward eye, and moralized by what we remember of "The Scarlet Letter," and "Legends of the Province House," and certain portions of "The House of the Seven Gables." Our not too graphic historians coöperate with the word of mouth, spoken on from generation to generation, to outline a sketch of the bleak past.

A few legends soberly color this sketch. Old portraits, old teaspoons, old chairs, and beautiful old brass candlesticks, document and certify the partial portrait; and even the average young New Englander, incurious of his country's past, is always able to draw aside the curtain. from some such latent tableau or series of tableaux as this. He sees a long, narrow, wind-swept strip of land between forest and shore,between the Indian and the deep sea. If it is muster day in any village of the strip, all the ancestors above sixteen years old are marching about in armor. The officers wear swords, the men carry "match-locks" or tenfoot pikes. If it is town-meeting, the ancestors, clad now in the smallclothes, jerkins, ruffs, and steeple-crown hats of peace, discuss even the least affairs with the patience of their constitutional breeding, and gravely cast the affirmative corn or the negative bean. If it is no day in particular, the young New Englander may look through the leaded panes of a log house and see the ancestor-his ancestor, perhaps-reading the Bible aloud, or dozing before a mighty fire, or making ready his guns against the Indian enemy who neither slumbered nor slept. Winter, Sunday, the little fortified meeting-house, and the rote of a few doleful hymns, probably appear often indeed to our contemporary's vision of those strenuous beginnings. If the conception he has, the conception most of us have, of the intellectual and moral life of the people is as grim as the physical conditions under which they thought, prayed, worked, and fought, Hawthorne is probably responsible for it. Those brave, intelligent fanatics—always brave, and always intelligent where superstition was not concerned-were no doubt morbidly sensitive in both religion and morals. The early government of Massachusetts has rightly been called a theocracy. Although the church-members probably felt themselves nearer the Unseen than any like body of modern men except the Scottish Covenanters, yet the gist of all their praying was, in the words of the hymn, "for a closer walk with God."

The truth of this general statement cannot be denied. But it is an

imperfect statement, too often left without the obvious and needful supplement. In the Theocracy as such, in the preachings, prayings, and persecutions, we forget other quite as real aspects of these men. We forget them as soldiers and sailors; as law-makers, town-makers, and state-builders; as subjects of James and Charles and Cromwell, and Charles again. We lose sight of the secular man bound up with the consecrated man within the iron ribs of the Puritan. It is as if one should say that Franklin never lived because Jonathan Edwards was so much alive. And Hawthorne is to blame. Innocently, even unconsciously; yet still to blame. Other men have written about Puritans and their descendants; none other with Hawthorne's power, or with a tithe of his imagination.

People forget, too, how seldom that imagination exercises itself with simply historical subjects in dealing with New England life; and, although Hawthorne has unmistakably the historic consciousness, it might better be called the frisson historique. For, however he starts with a subject taken from history, in nine cases out of ten he either gives it an eerie twist, or makes it a mere point of departure into conscienceland, where, as an artist, he is forever pondering, in his inherited preoccupation with sin, grim, dusky problems of good and evil. The secular Puritan is nothing to him. The sinning good men, the persecutor and the persecuted, the bewitched, and the hag-ridden, are the Puritans for him. And this controlling bent of Hawthorne's mind, which shows itself first in tales of the early colonial time, still controls it in "The Blithedale Romance" and other stories of later New England life, as well as in "Rappacini's Daughter" and "Transformation."

At first, while Hawthorne was trying his hand at the external, the ethical preoccupation was probably unconscious. In "Mosses from an Old Manse" and in "Blithedale," where he is of course conscious enough of the habitual direction of his art, there are some admirable words of his own that are directly in point. "The Old Apple Dealer"-to be found in the "Mosses" begins with the following sentence: "The lover of the moral picturesque may sometimes find what he seeks in a character which is nevertheless of too negative a description to be seized upon and represented to the imaginative vision by word painting." The inveterate "lover of the moral picturesque" causes Miles Coverdale to say: "I had never before experienced a mood that so robbed the actual world of its solidity. It nevertheless involved a charm, on which-a devoted epicure of my own emotions—I resolved to pause, and enjoy the moral sillabub until quite dissolved away." Coverdale, whatever his habitual relation to his creator, is evidently Hawthorne during that

pause. Hawthorne himself is never more quintessentially Hawthorne than in a passage of the "Italian Note-Books," which, during some comment on the confessional, includes the pregnant remark:-"It must be very tedious to listen, day after day, to the minute and commonplace iniquities. of the multitude of penitents, and it cannot be often that these are redeemed by the treasure-trove of a great sin." Hawthorne's provinciality, so far as he was provincial—and in some directions this quality carried him a good way-was important in circumscribing the field of his imagination. It was still more important to a writer whose professional treasure-trove was sin, or rather the sense of sin, that there were few or no outward distractions to beguile him from the main tendency of his genius. Hawthorne's heart was with New England, and his treasure was in the consecrated, Calvinistic part of the Puritan tradition.

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But the Puritan, redivivus, would have thought this treasure illgotten gain, a fortune with a curse on it. The Reverend John Cotton, minister of "New Boston," being asked why in his later days he indulged nocturnal studies more than formerly, pleasantly replied, "Because I love to sweeten my mouth with a piece of Calvin before I go to sleep." Now Mr. Cotton, were he still with us, might find many a piece of Calvin in the works of Hawthorne, but so flavored, sauced, and garnished as to be no better than witches' broth in the mouth of a Puritan divine. Mr. Henry James, who first expressed in precise terms the truth about Hawthorne's use of his material, thereby did an immense service to criticism in relieving the world of the impression, on the one hand, that he was the romancier pessimiste of Montégut's essay, and of the impression, on the other hand, that he was a kind of Neo-Puritanic teacher, with a moral and a purpose. Nothing in criticism is more subtle, and nothing, I am persuaded, more just, than Mr. James's pages concerning this matter. I risk injustice to him for the pleasure of quoting here a word or two of that remarkable exposition. "Nothing is more curious and interesting," says Mr. James, "than this almost exclusively imported character of the sense of sin in Hawthorne's mind; it seems to exist there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. He had ample cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it was reproduced in him; looking into his soul he found it there. But his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual: it was not moral and theological. He played with it, and used it as a pigment; he treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively." In less dignified language, he found a great lump of Puritan black lead, which, by some process he never explained, arrived upon his palette as the varying hues of fancy. Hawthorne, indeed, was a psychoanalyst ahead of time.