Hawthorne | Page 2

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 a literary theory; he was guiltless of a system, and I am not sure that he had
ever heard of Realism, this remarkable compound having (although it was invented some
time earlier) come into general use only since his death. He had certainly not proposed to
himself to give an account of the social idiosyncrasies of his fellow-citizens, for his touch
on such points is always light and vague, he has none of the apparatus of an historian, and
his shadowy style of portraiture never suggests a rigid standard of accuracy. Nevertheless
he virtually offers the most vivid reflection of New England life that has found its way
into literature. His value in this respect is not diminished by the fact that he has not
attempted to portray the usual Yankee of comedy, and that he has been almost culpably
indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the variations of colloquial English
that may be observed in the New World. His characters do not express themselves in the
dialect of the Biglow Papers--their language indeed is apt to be too elegant, too delicate.
They are not portraits of actual types, and in their phraseology there is nothing imitative.
But none the less, Hawthorne's work savours thoroughly of the local soil--it is redolent of
the social system in which he had his being.
This could hardly fail to be the case, when the man himself was so deeply rooted in the
soil. Hawthorne sprang from the primitive New England stock; he had a very definite and
conspicuous pedigree. He was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July, 1804,
and his birthday was the great American festival, the anniversary of the Declaration of
national Independence.[1] Hawthorne was in his disposition an unqualified and
unflinching American; he found occasion to give us the measure of the fact during the
seven years that he spent in Europe toward the close of his life; and this was no more than
proper on the part of a man who had enjoyed the honour of coming into the world on the
day on which of all the days in the year the great Republic enjoys her acutest fit of
self-consciousness. Moreover, a person who has been ushered into life by the ringing of
bells and the booming of cannon (unless indeed he be frightened straight out of it again
by the uproar of his awakening) receives by this very fact an injunction to do something
great, something that will justify such striking natal accompaniments. Hawthorne was by
race of the clearest Puritan strain. His earliest American ancestors (who wrote the name
"Hathorne"--the shape in which it was transmitted to Nathaniel, who inserted the w,) was
the younger son of a Wiltshire family, whose residence, according