ABSTRACT
James's account of Hawthorne is the application of Taine's formula of 'La race, le milieu et le moment' to Hawthorne's life and works. James stresses the moral tone of the world of undifferentiated equals: plain living and high thinking is its note, and he takes as its paradigmatic expression the group of innocents and idealists that made up the population of Brook Farm. The Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and relation, of the world being a more complicated place than it had hitherto seemed the future more treacherous, success more difficult. The thin and sparse population is more numerous, despite the usual function of wars to reduce population in the crudest possible way. Hawthorne was thrust by political preferment and financial necessity into a European world of materiality and diplomacy, and was unable to use it imaginatively.
