Ch. 6 - England and Italy

Hawthorne was close upon fifty years of age when he came to Europe--a
fact that should be remembered when those impressions which he
recorded in five substantial volumes (exclusive of the novel written
in Italy), occasionally affect us by the rigidity of their point of
view. His Note-Books, kept during his residence in England, his two
winters in Rome, his summer in Florence, were published after his
death; his impressions of England, sifted, revised, and addressed
directly to the public, he gave to the world shortly before this
event. The tone of his European Diaries is often so fresh and
unsophisticated that we find ourselves thinking of the writer as a
young man, and it is only a certain final sense of something
reflective and a trifle melancholy that reminds us that the simplicity
which is on the whole the leading characteristic of their pages, is,
though the simplicity of inexperience, not that of youth. When I say
inexperience, I mean that Hawthorne's experience had been narrow. His
fifty years had been spent, for much the larger part, in small
American towns--Salem, the Boston of forty years ago, Concord, Lenox,
West Newton--and he had led exclusively what one may call a
village-life. This is evident, not at all directly and superficially,
but by implication and between the lines, in his desultory history of
his foreign years. In other words, and to call things by their names,
he was exquisitely and consistently provincial. I suggest this fact
not in the least in condemnation, but, on the contrary, in support of
an appreciative view of him. I know nothing more remarkable, more
touching, than the sight of this odd, youthful--elderly mind,
contending so late in the day with new opportunities for learning old
things, and on the whole profiting by them so freely and gracefully.
The Note-Books are provincial, and so, in a greatly modified degree,
are the sketches of England, in _Our Old Home_; but the beauty and
delicacy of this latter work are so interwoven with the author's air
of being remotely outside of everything he describes, that they count
for more, seem more themselves, and finally give the whole thing the
appearance of a triumph, not of initiation, but of the provincial
point of view itself.

I shall not attempt to relate in detail the incidents of his residence
in England. He appears to have enjoyed it greatly, in spite of the
deficiency of charm in the place to which his duties chiefly confined
him. His confinement, however, was not unbroken, and his published
journals consist largely of minute accounts of little journeys and
wanderings, with his wife and his three children, through the rest of
the country; together with much mention of numerous visits to London,
a city for whose dusky