Stylistic Features in “Young Goodman Brown” Henry Seidel Canby in “A Skeptic Incompatible with His Time and Past” states: “And indeed there is a lack of consistency between the contempt our younger critics heap on Hawthorne's moral creations and their respect for his style. They admit in the expression a dignity that they do not allow in the thing expressed" (62). The style found in Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” has not only a “dignity of expression” as stated above, but also many other interesting aspects, discussed in the following essay. Canby continues: Hawthorne's style has a sweet beauty; it is sometimes dull, sometimes staid, but never for an instant cheap, never, like our later American styles, lacking in tone and unity. It is a style with a patina that may or may not accord with current tastes, and yet, as in the case of Browne, Addison, Lamb, Thoreau, it is undoubtedly a style. Such styles arise only from rich soil, long cultivated, and such soil was that of Hawthorne. . . . Restraining himself from the new life of America into which Whitman would dive so exuberantly, he kept his style, like him, uncontaminated by the prosaic world of the Industrial Revolution and chose, for his reality, the workings of the moral will. You can hardly praise his style and condemn his subjects. Even romantic themes that would have been absurd in lesser hands gain dignity from its purpose. . . . As Shakespeare, the Renaissance man, gave feudalism its final rise in the imagination, so Hawthorne, the skeptic with a moral obsession, elevated New England Puritanism - not the theory, but the practice and even more the results in mind and spirit – in art. . This is the basis of his style (63)....... middle of paper ......: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966.Fuller, Edmund and B. Jo Kinnick in “Stories Derived from New England Living.” In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996.Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "Young Goodman Brown." 1835. http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~daniel/amlit/goodman/goodmantext.htmlJames, Henry. Hawthorn. http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/nh/nhhj1.htmlKaul, AN “Introduction”. In Hawthorne – A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by AN Kaul. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966. Swisher, Clarice. "Nathaniel Hawthorne: A Biography." In Readings on Nathaniel Hawthorne, edited by Clarice Swisher. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven Press, 1996. Wagenknecht, Edward. Nathaniel Hawthorne - The man, his stories and his love stories. New York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1989.