...difficulty in the lack of materials'. James quotes him to this effect: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight as is happily the case with my dear native land. James was determined...

...study of Hawthorne. The latter had written, in preface to The Marble Faun: No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, not anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with...

...to a foreign country ; for he gives as reason for this, that " no man, without a trial, can conceive the difficulty of writing a romance about a country...no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque or gloomy wrong." Of course not ; there is no picturesque or gloomy wrong, when that wrong is the suffering...

...complex layering of past and present and of moral ambiguity in Europe to the clean slate of America, "where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery,...wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight" (3). But of course Hawthorne set much of his best work in America, exploring...

...that country. — Fanny Kemble (Mrs. Butler), A Year of Consolation, 1847 No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country [New England] where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong,...

...unfavorable British response to Go Down, Moses, received almost no negative comments in Britain. No author can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...prosperity, as is happily the 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....

...James. As Hawthorne puts it in his preface to The Marble Faun (1860), "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land" (3). While Hawthorne...

...ever emerged. James notes that even Hawthorne himself had lamented in his preface to The Marble Faun "the difficulty of writing a Romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiq37 uity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a common-place prosperity,...

...of primitive being and modern man. 'In our country,' says the American author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 'there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong.' For an original primitive like Whitman his innate inclination is to do more or less primitive reading;...

...which would seem to confirm Hardy's reasons for declining the 'invitation'; No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance...wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land.4 Hawthorne could claim...