To interpret this was the honorable office of
his classmate Longfellow, who, with as much ease as dignity and charm,
has filled the gap between the two half-worlds. The experiment to be
tried was, simply, whether with books and men at his command, and
isolated from the immediate influence of Europe, this American could
evolve any new quality for the enrichment of literature. The conditions
were strictly carried out; even after he began to come in contact with
men, in the intervals of his retirement, he saw only pure American
types. A foreigner must have been a rare bird in Salem, in those days;
for the maritime element which might have brought him was still
American. Hawthorne, as we have seen, and as his Note-Books show, pushed
through the farming regions and made acquaintance with the men of the
soil; and probably the first alien of whom he got at all a close view
was the Monsieur S---- whom he found at Bridge's, on his visit to the
latter, in 1837, described at length in the Note-Books. So much did
Hawthorne study from these types, and so closely, that he might, had his
genius directed, have written the most homely and realistic novels of
New England life from the material which he picked up quite by the way.
But though he did not translate his observations thus, the originality
which he was continuously ripening amid such influences was radically
affected by them. They established a broad, irrepressible republican
sentiment in his mind; they assisted his natural, manly independence and
simplicity to assert themselves unaffectedly in letters; and they had
not a little to do, I suspect, with fostering his strong turn for
examining with perfect freedom and a certain refined shrewdness into
everything that came before him, without accepting prescribed opinions.
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