Nathaniel Hawthorne

THIS life of Hawthorne by an English biographer is written with a modern impressionistic novelist’s selectiveness; also with a verbal brilliance that can be illustrated from almost any page. Unlike the work of a good many psychographers from Strachey on, however, Mr. Mather’s pages focus their brilliance, not on advertising the author at the expense of the subject, but on achieving the maximum of disclosure with the minimum of language. If a great imaginative writer can ever be said to need the comprehension of posterity as a human being merely, Hawthorne can be said to need this life, which for the first time persuasively extricates the baffling truth about him as a man strangely locked away from himself, progressively more and more paralyzed by self-distrust, and unable for years on end to recover the slightest conviction that the words his pen poured out by the hundred thousand had any connection with what it and he had always been meant to accomplish.