Emerson and Taine give us their impressions of a foreign land: Hawthorne
causes us to inhale its very atmosphere, and makes the country ours for
the time being, rather than an alien area which we scrutinize in
passing. Yet here and there he partakes of the very qualities that are
dominant with Emerson and Taine. "Every Englishman runs to 'The Times'
with his little grievance, as a child runs to his mother," is as
epigrammatic as anything in "English Traits"; [Footnote: No one, I
think, has so well defined our relation to the English as Hawthorne, in
a casual phrase from one of his printed letters: "We stand in the light
of posterity to them, and have the privileges of posterity." This, on
London, ought to become proverbial: "London is like the grave in one
respect,--any man can make himself at home there; and whenever a man
finds himself homeless elsewhere, he had better die, or go to London."]
and there is a tendency in his pages to present the national character
in a concrete form, as the French writer gives it. But, in addition,
Hawthorne is an artist and a man of humor; and renders human character
with a force and fineness which give it its true value as being, after
all, far weightier and dearer to us than the most important or famous of
congealed _results_ of character. Withal a wide and keen observer
and a hospitable entertainer of opinions, he does not force these upon
us as final. Coming and going at ease, they leave a mysterious sense of
greater wisdom with us, an indefinable residue of refined truth.
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