SO FAR THE cause of the American novel had enlisted no man
who came primarily for the sake of art. Brown had been a
radical journalist, Cooper a stentorian man of action, Simms a
passionate antiquarian; all of them had been technically im-
provisatores. The art of fiction was being studied in the United
States during this half century chiefly in connection with the
short story, which Irving had invested with his amused and
amusing charm, of which Poe had discovered secrets of struc-
ture and effect not heretofore analyzed, and into which Haw-
thorne as the century advanced was pouring a deeper and
deeper strain of intellectual and moral significance. Neither
Irving nor Poe undertook a novel in any strict sense of the
word, nearly as Irving's versions of history in works like The
Conquest of Granada or Astoria approach the manner and
color of contemporary romance; or bulky as was Poe Narra-
tive of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket ( 1838), which pre-
tended to be a veracious book of travels though it was not.
Nor do such pleasant divagations as Longfellow Hyperion
( 1839) and Kavanagh ( 1849) or Whittier Margaret Smith's
Journal ( 1849), though not without invention, take any con-
spicuous position in the history of the American novel. When
Hawthorne published The Scarlet Letter in 1850 he could not
profit by a long series of native experiments in the art of the
novel but had to initiate the mode in which he has since
seemed supreme.

And yet The Scarlet Letter represents in Hawthorne's own
career the fruit of an apprenticeship to art the like of which
no other American man of letters had demanded of himself.

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