Preface

The literary reputation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's only son, Julian, led some critics in his own day to compare him favora­ bly with George Eliot, Henry James, and William Dean Howells, as well as his father. This was a mistake, but time has repaired it—indeed, has savagely reversed the scales. Julian, the young pretender to the glorious family name, certainly outwrote his somewhat sluggish father quantitatively: he was the author of no less than twenty-six long and short novels, over sixty short stories, almost a hundred essays, and several lengthy works of biography and autobiography. Yet who today remembers a single one of his books—unless it be the still well-regarded Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife, the reverential biography? The primary reason for Julian Haw­ thorne's decline ought to be stated frankly at the outset: in an age of giants like Clemens and James—to speak only of his American contemporaries—Hawthorne was a pygmy. He was a fascinating but shallow man, and his works reflect more of the shallowness than of the fascination. "No good novel," James wisely remarks, "will ever proceed from a superficial mind." Yet, surprisingly, there are quite genuine if rare treasures scattered here and there in the works of the younger Haw­ thorne, treasures that ought to be recovered unapologetically. There are many other reasons for the dusty shroud on Haw­ thorne's reputation, some of them instructive as examples of critical illogic and of shifting fashions in literary taste. First, certain extraliterary features had entered into the criticism of his fiction before the publication of his last novels in 1896. It is almost impossible to find an account of Hawthorne's work that