...clumsiest tricks. He forces his apologies to sound like boasting. "No author," he says, "can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, as is happily" (it must and shall be happily !) "the case with my dear native land. It will be very...

...old Salem institution (1850). Hawthorne afterwards observed that " no author without a trial can see the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...commonplace prosperity in broad and simple daylight." Yet in " The Scarlet Letter " he had touched even the gloom of Puritanism with the glamour of romance,...

...insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a trial, can conceive the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...as is happily the case with my dear native land." Mr. Henry James seems to accept Hawthorne's view that his limitations were objective, and that he might...

...finding romance in the commonplace United States of the present. "No author," he says, "can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor any thing but a commonplace prosperity, as is happily the case with my dear native land." 1 Even here,...

...Hawthorne's own view of his work. "No author," he says in the preface to The Marble Faun, "can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, as is happily the case with my dear native land." There is a touch of malicious irony in this last...

...words. He thought that America was not an inspiring country for a writer of romance, because, he said, "there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong." Yet he seems to have been somewhat mistaken, as men of genius often are, and to have disproved his...

...insisted upon as they are, and must needs be, in America. No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust, before romance-writers may find congenial and easily handled themes,...

...nationality, observed in his preface to The Marble Faun: "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...as is happily the case with my dear native land." The challenge to furnish the nation with a native literature and culture preoccupied American artists...

...blandness that Nathaniel Hawthorne, looking for materials for his novels, complained of his country: "There is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no...common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight." 17 The most recent scholarship places beside that plaint a sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century...

...clumsiest tricks. He forces his apologies to sound like boasting. 'No author,' he says, 'can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, as is happily' (it must and shall be happily) 'the case with my dear native land. It will be very long,...