Lecture on Hawthorne.

Professor Bliss Perry lectured in Sever 11 yesterday afternoon on "Hawthorne." He said in part:

Of all American writers Hawthorne was the most imaginative and sensitive. His boyhood and his early manhood were marked by a strange and almost morbid hyper-sensitiveness of nature that made him shrink instinctively from contact with others. He lived in the realm of his own creative fancy, and of the actual world about him he had little knowledge and less experience. His life was reflected in his early writings, and they are unnatural and constrained.

Hawthorne's visit to the Berkshires in 1838 marked the turning point of his career. Contact with the rough, hearty mountaineers and frontiersmen brought to him for almost the first time a realization of other men and other lives, and with this experience the self centred traits of his nature began to disappear. From this time must be dated the real beginning of his literary career. The old sensitiveness to emotion and idealism, the delicate fancy and imagination still remained, and to these he has added something of the sympathy with mankind and human nature by which alone he might interpret the emotions and characters of men.

The style and character of his early novels is much the same; all infused with the same personality of the author, somewhat moody and sombre, with a tendency towards moralizing. Yet in all his writing is an undercurrent of hopefulness, of love for the good and beautiful, and of faith in its ultimate triumph. There is very little plot in Hawthorne' s stories,--they are essentially studies of characters and emotions.

On all his works Hawthorne put the stamp of his own individuality. They mirror the delicacy and airiness of his genius, and are tinged with the deep moral problems and convictions that entered into his life.