After this introduction, of which, I hope, the readers will feel the pertinence in the following chapters, I should like, still from the point of view of psychological research and its influence on the American novel of to-day, to study certain aspects, which I consider very modern, of the novels of Nathaniel Hawthorne. He is a great artist and an armed psychologist, an able story-teller and, one might say, the detective of the Puritan conscience. He is, in many respects, very Freudian; what attracts him, from the moment he starts writing, is the inmost life, the enigma in the depths of the conscience. He feels that the world of appearances is false; that, being false, it is tragic; that the human being is twofold; that under the outward Self, the superimposed Self, is hidden a profounder, timid being or, as one says to-day, repressed. Instead of denouncing moral duplicity, like Carlyle or Mark Twain, Hawthorne transforms it into art. He loves enigmas, mysteries, obscurity, secret retreats. He is the explorer of the subterranean world, the Conan Doyle of the conscience. In that, Hawthorne is assuredly a compatriot of Edgar Allan Poe. He lived a narrow existence in a monotonous and dismal New England town, but one filled with dreams and memories. Solitude and disillusion were his daily bread. His political ambitions were not fulfilled. He secluded himself in Concord, in the unfriendly neighborhood of Emerson, another repressed individual like himself. Heredity weighed heavily upon him. There is no doubt that one must look into his genealogy for the secret of his obsessions. All his life, Hawthorne was haunted by the idea of crime, by the thought of the Inquisition, by dungeons and tortures. Is not the crime which, in his “Marble Faun,” Donatello commits because of the averted glance of the unfortunate Miriam, an unconscious memory of that tragic duel suggested, we are told, to his friend Cilley, by an involuntary gesture of Hawthorne? Nor could he forget that one of his ancestors had been a witch burner. All that explains Hawthorne’s complex, the vague sense of disquietude and the mental fear which charge the atmosphere of his novels.