ABSTRACT
No author canconceive of the difficulty ofwriting a romance about a country wherethereisno shadow,no antiquity,no mystery, no picturesque andgloomy wrong, nor anythingbut a commonplace prosperity, asishappilythe case with my dear native land. Hawthorne need not have worried: it did not remain happily the case with his dear native land for long. He died while the Civil War was still in progress, and for the South, at any rate, the War and the Reconstruction were to provide quite as much shadow, mystery, picturesque and gloomy wrong as any literary man could reasonably demand; and ifthere was no antiquity in the European sense there were plenty ofruins, without which, according to Hawthorne, romance and
poetry could not grow. And to-day, ifwe wish to find in contemporary writing the fullest reflection of the qualities Hawthorne desired in a country, where do we go to if not to the literature of the South and, in particular, to the obsessed, doom-drenched fiction ofMr. Faulkner? There have been times when one has felt that Mr. Faulkner's exceedingly romantic imagination has got the better of him, when he has seemed to be revelling in spiritual melodrama for its own sake and busy parodying himself, as in Absalom, Absalom! with its nimiety oflunatics. Yet it would be impossible, I think, for even the most resolute hater of Mr. Faulkner's art to say this of Intruder in the Dust; it is much more likely that the austerer critics will find it too full of meaning, its message too plain.
