You who have conceived of
Hawthorne as a soft-marrowed dweller in the dusk, fostering his own
shyness and fearing to take the rubs of common men, pray look well at
all this. And you, also, who discourse about the conditions essential to
the development of genius, about the _milieu_ and the
_moment_, and try to prove America a vacuum which the Muse abhors,
will do well to consider the phenomenon. "It is a poor compensation, yet
better than the Token"; so he wrote, knowing that his unmatched tales
were being coined for even a less reward than mere daily bread. He took
the conditions that were about him, and gave them a dignity by his own
fine perseverance. It is this inspired industry, this calm facing of the
worst and making it the best, which has formed the history of all art.
You talk of the ages, and choose this or that era as the only fit one.
You long for a cosey niche in the past; but genius crowds time and
eternity into the present, and says to you, "Make your own century!"
Meanwhile, if he received no solid gain from his exertions, Hawthorne
was winning a reputation. In January he had written home: "My worshipful
self is a very famous man in London, the 'Athenaeum' having noticed all
my articles in the last Token, with long extracts." This refers to the
'Athenaeum' for November 7, 1835, which mentioned "The Wedding Knell"
and "The Minister's Black Veil" as being stories "each of which has
singularity enough to recommend it to the reader," and gave three
columns to a long extract from "The Maypole of Merry Mount"; the notice
being no doubt the work of the critic Chorley, who afterward met
Hawthorne in England.
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