This all flows with something of the noble ease of hexameters, yet without falling into the vices of pseudo-poetic prose. The mere sound of his sentences gives Hawthorne’s prose a wonderful momentum that keeps us interested even when at times we begin to wonder if his subject-matter is quite as interesting as it ought to be. This grave and equable momentum is one of his greatest technical qualities. It is a quality that cannot be adequately illustrated in single sentences or detached passages, because its success is not the success of occasional felicities but of something sustained and pervasive. It may even be imputed as a fault to Hawthorne that he can never, or almost never, escape from the equable rhythm of his prose. He seldom ends a story with the slightly different momentum due to an ending. It is not merely, however, that his stories end quietly: he is like a rider who rides beautifully but does not know how to dismount. He maintains his graceful ease of motion until the last moment, and then he slides off as best he can. But it would be folly to regard Hawthorne’s rhythm as wholly--or even mainly--a technical quality. The rhythm of prose is never that, and it is in vain to play the sedulous ape to the great masters if nothing but their style is imitated. It is not an accident that the greatest English prose is to be found in the Bible. The rhythm of the greatest prose seems at times the rhythm of the spirit of man as it contemplates the life of men in the light of eternity. The rhythm to a Plato, a Milton, a Sir Thomas Browne, is inevitably of a kind that a Jane Austen or a Thackeray, with all their genius, could never achieve. It is the echo of the emotion felt by men to whom time and place are fables with another meaning besides that which appears on the surface. The realists can never write the greatest prose, because to them the world they see is not fabulous but a hard fact. The greatest writers all see the world as fabulous. Their men and women are inhabited by angels or devils, or, on a lower plane, have something of the nature of ghosts or fairies or goblins. If Othello were not a fable as well as a man, he would be no better than a criminal lunatic. If King Lear were not a fable as well as man, he would be a subject for the psychoanalyst. Imagine either of them as a modern Englishman, putting his case before a judge and jury, and you will see how the artist, even though his characters as a rule are characters such as may be found in reality, must remove them out of and above reality into the region of fables in order to make them permanently real to the imagination. Dickens turned Victorian England into a myth peopled by goblins. Dostoievsky turned Russia into a myth peopled by goblins and demons. It is not that they denied the reality of the world before their eyes, but that they saw within it and about it another world apart from which it had very little meaning.