But I fancy a special
appropriateness for us in the peculiar mixture of estimation and
enthusiasm which forms the medium through which Hawthorne looks at the
spectacle of transatlantic life and its surroundings. He visits the
British Museum, and encounters only disappointment at the mutilated
sculptures of the Parthenon; but out of this confession, which is truth,
slowly arises the higher truth of that airy yet profound response with
which he greets the multiform mute company of marble or painted shapes
that form the real population of Rome.
Even there, he has much dissent to make, still; and we may not find
it at all essential or beneficial to follow each of his deviations
ourselves. But however we may differ with him, it is impossible not to
feel sure that within this circle of contradictions, of preference for
new frames and of his friend Thompson's pictures to all but a very few
of the old masters', somewhere within there is a perfectly trustworthy
aesthetic sensibility which grasps the "unwritten rules of taste," the
inmost truth of all art. This inmost secret is, however we may turn it,
a matter of paradox, and the moment it professes to be explained, that
moment are the gates of the penetralia shut upon us. The evasiveness and
the protest, then, with which Hawthorne discourses to himself as he
wanders through the galleries of Europe, are the trembling of the
needle, perfectly steadfast to the polar opposites of truth, yet
quivering as with a fear that it may be unsettled by some artificial
influence from its deep office of inner constancy.
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