Helen we
know, and Antigone, and Benedick, and Falstaff, and Miranda, and Parson
Adams, and Major Pendennis,--these people have walked on pavements or
looked out of club-room windows; but what are these idiosyncrasies into
which Mr. Hawthorne has breathed a necromantic life, and which he has
endowed with the forms and attributes of men? And yet, grant him his
premises, that is, let him once get his morbid tendency, whether
inherited or the result of special experience, either incarnated
as a new man or usurping all the faculties of one already in
the flesh, and it is marvellous how subtilely and with what
truth to as much of human nature as is included in a diseased
consciousness he traces all the finest nerves of impulse and motive,
how he compels every trivial circumstance into an accomplice of his
art, and makes the sky flame with foreboding or the landscape chill and
darken with remorse. It is impossible to think of Hawthorne without at
the same time thinking of the few great masters of imaginative
composition; his works, only not abstract because he has the genius
to make them ideal, belong not specially to our clime or generation;
it is their moral purpose alone, and perhaps their sadness, that mark
him as the son of New England and the Puritans.
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