pursuit of the beauty which has its basis in "the good and true"—if Puritanism means these things, then Hawthorne was a Puritan. If, however, our young people will not permit us to use the term in this high derivative sense, if they persist in employing it as a term of dire derogation, then let us call Hawthorne a Transcendentalist, let us call him a subtle critic and satirist of Puritanism from the Transcendental point of view. But let us make this concession to our over-heated young people with a strict understanding that in return they shall abjure their ill custom of applying to a fanatic or to a starched hypocrite the same term that they apply to Emerson. If Puritanism is to mean what they would have it, they must cease and refrain entirely from referring to the leaders of the Renaissance in New England as Puritans. The essence of that movement of which Hawthorne is an admirable representative is a deliverance from the letter of the law and a recovery of happiness through the right uses of the imagination.
The close relationship between Hawthorne's Transcendental point of view and the character of his fiction has hardly received the attention that it deserves. Henry James, who can with difficulty forgive him for not being a realist, declares that "he was not a man with a literary theory," and goes on to complain that "he has been almost culpably indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the variations of colloquial English that may
