Ch. 1 - Early Years - Page 2

contrasting his proportions with
those of a great civilization. But our author must accept the awkward
as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the advantage of
pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower of art blooms
only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of history to
produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social machinery
to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto had
other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth to
writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for
them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic
growth are the sum of what the world usually recognises, and in this
modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest
and sweetest fragrance.

His very simplicity has been in his favour; it has helped him to
appear complete and homogeneous. To talk of his being national would
be to force the note and make a mistake of proportion; but he is, in
spite of the absence of the realistic quality, intensely and vividly
local. Out of the soil of New England he sprang--in a crevice of that
immitigable granite he sprouted and bloomed. Half of the interest that
he possesses for an American reader with any turn for analysis must
reside in his latent New England savour; and I think it no more than
just to say that whatever entertainment he may yield to those who know
him at a distance, it is an almost indispensable condition of properly
appreciating him to have received a personal impression of the
manners, the morals, indeed of the very climate, of the great region
of which the remarkable city of Boston is the metropolis. The cold,
bright air of New England seems to blow through his pages, and these,
in the opinion of many people, are the medium in which it is most
agreeable to make the acquaintance of that tonic atmosphere. As to
whether it is worth while to seek to know something of New England in
order to extract a more intimate quality from _The House of Seven
Gables_ and _The Blithedale Romance_, I need not pronounce; but it is
certain that a considerable observation of the society to which these
productions were more directly addressed is a capital preparation for
enjoying them. I have alluded to the absence in Hawthorne of that
quality of realism which is now so much in fashion, an absence in
regard to which there will of course be more to say; and yet I think I
am not fanciful in saying that he testifies to the sentiments of the
society in which he flourished almost as pertinently (proportions
observed) as Balzac and some of his descendants--MM. Flaubert and
Zola--testify to the manners and morals of the French people. He was
not a man with