It was this breadth of view, combined with his technical gifts as a teller of tales, that made Hawthorne a great artist; for no degree of skill or cleverness can give lasting significance to the work of a man who has not in spirit been taken up to a high mountain and shown the uttermost kingdoms of the world. Granted a "philosophy of life" which inspires a man to high endeavor and enables him to see the relation between the things that are seen and are temporal and the things that are not seen and are eternal, the creative artist need not be always preaching a moral or adorning a tale. The implications that he finds in his material and the abiding convictions he has about life and death need no labeling. They appear as a man's character does, from his daily talk and conduct. Let the romancer state this in his own words: When romances really do teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtile process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod,--or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly,--thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude. A high truth, indeed, fairly, finely, and skilfully wrought out, brightening at every step, and crowning the final development of a work of fiction, may add an artistic glory, but is never any truer, and seldom any more evident, at the last page than at the first. Now and again Hawthorne forgot this, and stopped to expound and explain, which was unnecessary. And now and again he used his powers to vent his feelings by contemptuous portrayal of living people, holding them up to scorn, which was unworthy. But even though he lacked the Olympian serenity of the supreme story-tellers, he wrote as a wise man, and he wrote surpassingly well. It remains, then, to speak of his workmanship. In the preface to "The House of the Seven Gables," from which the above passage is quoted, Hawthorne discusses his methods as a romancer: how he combines materials at hand, but makes them present the truth of the human heart not as the realist but under circumstances of his own choosing and with a "slight, delicate and evanescent flavor" of the marvelous. And this shadowy unreality, he points out, comes from the connection of "a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend, prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist." It is a cue to every one of the longer tales and to most of the short ones. Always the outreaching hand of the past plucking at the garments of the present,--the traditions of an elder day or the consequences of a deed committed before the opening of the story.