And as if, in this
singular world, all truth must turn to paradox at the touch of an index
finger, that almost faulty abstention from assuming the European tone
which has made Hawthorne the traveller appear to certain readers a
little crude,--that very air of being the uncritical and slightly
puzzled American is precisely the source of his most delightful
accuracies of interpretation.
The third greatest distinction of his foreign observation is its entire
freedom from specialism. Perhaps this cannot be made to appear more
clearly than in the contrast presented by his "English Note-Books" and
"Our Old Home" to Emerson's "English Traits," and Taine's "Notes on
England." The latter writer is an acute, alert, industrious, and
picturesque comparer of his own and a neighboring country, and is
accompanied by a light battery of literary and pictorial criticism,
detached from his heavier home armament. Emerson, on the other hand,
gives us probably the most masterly and startling analysis of a people
which has ever been offered in the same slight bulk, unsurpassed, too,
in brilliancy and penetration of statement. But the "English Traits" is
as clear, fixed, and accurate as a machinist's plan, and perhaps a
little too rigidly defined. Hawthorne's review of England, though not
comparable to Emerson's work for analysis, has this advantage, that its
outline is more flexible and leaves room for many individual
discriminations to which it supplies an easily harmonized groundwork.
Pages:
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290