by trivial description; it cannot emerge from the awkward mechanism of a tale within a tale; it remains partial, not entire. Like _Alice Doane_, _Ethan Brand_ is conceived as the culmination of a novel. To say that either might have taken form as a short story is not to belittle Hawthorne’s art, but to indicate his preference of method. _Ethan Brand_ achieves a picturesqueness more vivid than is usual in Hawthorne’s shorter pieces. The action begins, as in Hawthorne it does not often begin, at once. The narrative skill appears in the delicate and thoroughly characteristic device of the little boy; but imagine the increase of purely narrative interest if Hawthorne had focused this tale as he focused _The White Old Maid_; and then imagine _The White Old Maid_ itself composed without the superfluous lapse of time, like _The Wives of the Dead_. That Hawthorne seems not to have realised distinctly the proper scope of the short story, and further that he did not follow its typical mode when that mode seems most apt,--both these inferences are supported by the whole trend of his habit. For Hawthorne’s genius was not bent in the direction of narrative form. Much of his characteristic work is rather descriptive,--_Sunday at Home_, _Sights from a Steeple_, _Main Street_, _The Village Uncle_,--to turn over the leaves of his collections is to be reminded how many of his short pieces are like these.[18] Again, his habitual symbolism is handled quite unevenly, without narrative sureness. At its best it has a fine, permeating suggestiveness, as in _The Ambitious Guest_; at its worst, as in _Fancy’s Show Box_, it is moral allegory hardly above the children’s page of the religious weekly journal. Lying between these two extremes, a great bulk of his short fictions shows imperfect command of narrative adjustments. The delicate symbolism of _David Swan_ is introduced, like fifty pieces in the annuals, whose authors were incapable of Hawthorne’s fancy, by formal exposition of the meaning. The poetry of the _Snow Image_ is crudely embodied, and has also to be expounded after the tale is done. The lovely morality of the _Great Stone Face_ has a form almost as for a sermon. The point for consideration is not the ultimate merit of Hawthorne’s tales, but simply the tendency of their habit of form. For this view it is important to remember also his bent toward essay. Description and essay, separately and together, sum up the character of much of his work that was evidently most spontaneous. Perhaps nothing that Hawthorne wrote is finer or more masterly than the introduction to the _Scarlet Letter_. For this one masterpiece who would not give volumes of formally perfect short stories? Yet if it is characteristic of his genius,--and few would deny that it is,--it suggests strongly why the development of a new form of narrative was not for him. This habit of mind explains why the _Marble Faun_, for all the beauty of its parts,