Status Updates From Hawthorne (Henry James Coll...

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 work will remain; it is too original and exquisite to pass away; among the men of imagination he will always have his niche. No one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more successfully expressed his vision. He was not a moralist, and he was not simply a poet.

He was a beautiful, natural, original genius, and his life had been singularly exempt from worldly preoccupations and vulgar efforts. It had been as pure, as simple, as unsophisticated, as his work. He had lived primarily in his domestic affections, which were of the tenderest kind; and then--without eagerness, without pretension, but with a great deal of quiet devotion--in his charming art.

Hawthorne was silent with his lips; but he talked with his pen. The tone of his writing is often that of charming talk--ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of gossip, and none of its vulgarity.

The Transcendentalists read a great deal of French and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand and Goethe, and many other writers; but the strong and deep New England conscience accompanied them on all their intellectual excursions, and there never was a so-called "movement" that embodied itself, on the whole, in fewer eccentricities of conduct, or that borrowed a smaller licence in private deportment.

If that was the era of Transcendentalism, Transcendentalism could only have sprouted in the soil peculiar to the general locality of which I speak--the soil of the old New England morality, gently raked and refreshed by an imported culture.

The Blithedale Romance is the main result of Brook Farm; but The Blithedale Romance was very properly never recognised by the Brook Farmers as an accurate portrait of their little colony.

He was not only by conviction, but personally and by association, a Democrat. When in later years he found himself in contact with European civilisation, he appears to have become conscious of a good deal of latent radicalism in his disposition; he was oppressed with the burden of antiquity in Europe, and he found himself sighing for lightness and freshness and facility of change.

Hawthorne had, as regards the two earlier centuries of New England life, that faculty which is called now-a-days the historic consciousness.

And then they have the further merit of seeming, for what they are, to spring up so freely and lightly. The author has all the ease, indeed, of a regular dweller in the moral, psychological realm; he goes to and fro in it, as a man who knows his way. His tread is a light and modest one, but he keeps the key in his pocket.

This is the real charm of Hawthorne's writing--this purity and spontaneity and naturalness of fancy.

--such trifles, I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation." This is very becomingly uttered; but it may be said, partly in answer to it, and partly in confirmation, that the valuable element in these things was not what Hawthorne put into them consciously, but what passed into them without his being able to measure it--the element of simple genius, the quality of imagination.

A biographer has of necessity a relish for detail; his business is to multiply points of characterisation.

à propos of which I may say that there is always a charm in Hawthorne's prefaces which makes one grateful for a pretext to quote from them.

If the tone of the American world is in some respects provincial, it is in none more so than in this matter of the exaggerated homage rendered to authorship. The gentleman or the lady who has written a book is in many circles the object of an admiration too indiscriminating to operate as an encouragement to good writing.

He was poor, he was solitary, and he undertook to devote himself to literature in a community in which the interest in literature was as yet of the smallest. It is not too much to say that even to the present day it is a considerable discomfort in the United States not to be "in business."

When we think of what the conditions of intellectual life, of taste, must have been in a small New England town fifty years ago; and when we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love of literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style and form and colour, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of them, compassion for the young man becomes our dominant sentiment, and we see the large dry vill

He was not expansive, he was not addicted to experiments and adventures of intercourse, he was not, personally, in a word, what is called sociable.

His very simplicity has been in his favour; it has helped him to appear complete and homogeneous.

The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American genius.