Xii IDEALS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE facts, temperament, place the weight of emphasis on the content of the language rather than on the language. As a rule American writers have cared supremely for the life, character, Nature they in- terpreted, portrayed, described. They have not been indifferent to form, as the work of Hawthorne, Poe and Mr. Aldrich abundantly shows; but their chief concern has been with the matter of their art rather than with the art itself. They have been enamored of beauty, after the manner of all their predecessors; but they have not been wholly absorbed by it; they have used the art of writing not as a form of esoteric skill, practiced by a privileged class for their own pleasure, but as a delicate and capacious medium for the disclosure of individual and national ideals. From one point of view this fundamental regard for ethical standards rather than for aesthetic effects brings out the limitation of American literature ; from another it is a prime source of its vitality and influence. However one may interpret it, the fact remains that American writers, from Bryant to Dr. Henry van Dyke and Mr. William Vaughan Moody, have been enamored of moral ideals, and American writing has been saturated with ethical feeling. Haw- thorne, the most sensitive artistic temperament among the New England writers, was concerned all his life with the moral aspects of experience. After a long escape from the New England environment and a long absorption of old world influences, when he wrote "The Marble Faun, " with its exquisite Italian background, his mind was still fastened on the changes wrought by what we call sin in the nature of man. Donatello has nothing in common with Dimmesdale and Judge Pyncheon and the long line of solitary figures in Hawthorne 's tales save his experience of the transforming power of sin. In Italy, where standards of life were so different from those which shaped the conscience of the great romancer, Hawthorne did not escape the domination of the moral ideal. It may be suspected that there is a hidden connection between the conviction that conduct is a prime factor in the problem of life
