It is
the same criticism which condemns Dickens for ridiculing certain
preachers, and neglecting to provide the antidote in form of a model
apostle, contrasted in the same book. This is the criticism which would
reduce all fiction to the pattern of the religious tract. Certain men
have certain things before them to do; they cannot devote a lifetime to
proving in their published works that they appreciate the excellence of
other things which they have no time and no supreme command to do.
Nothing, then, is more unsafe, than to imply from their silence that
they are deficient in particular phases of sympathy. The exposition of
the merits of the New England founders has been steadily in progress
from their own time to the present; and they have found a worthy
monument in the profound and detailed history of Palfrey. All the more
reason, why the only man yet born who could fill the darker spaces of
our early history with palpitating light of that wide-eyed truth and
eternal human consciousness which cast their deep blaze through
Hawthorne's books, should not forego his immortal privilege! The eulogy
is the least many-sided and perpetual of literary forms, and unless
Hawthorne had made himself the eulogist of the Puritans, he would still
have had to turn to our gaze the wrongs that, for good or ill, were
worked into the tissue of their infant state. But as it is, he has been
able to suggest a profounder view than is permitted either to the race
of historians or that of philosophers.
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