Hawthorne's genius was meditative rather than
dramatic. His artistic material was moral rather than physical;
he brooded over the soul of man as affected by this and that
condition and situation. The child of a new analytical age, he
thought out with rigid accuracy the precise circumstances
surrounding each one of his cases and modifying it. Many of his
sketches and short stories and most of his romances deal with
historical facts, moods, and atmospheres, and he knew the past of
New England as few men have ever known it. There is solid
historical and psychological stuff as the foundation of his
air-castles. His latent radicalism furnished him with a
touchstone of criticism as he interpreted the moral standards of
ancient communities; no reader of "The Scarlet Letter" can forget
Hawthorne's implicit condemnation of the unimaginative harshness
of the Puritans. His own judgment upon the deep matters of the
human conscience was stern enough, but it was a universalized
judgment, and by no means the result of a Calvinism which he
hated.
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