It is a natural question, why did not Hawthorne write an English
romance, as well, or rather than an Italian one? More than half his stay
abroad was north of the Channel, and one would infer that there could
have been no lack of suggestion there. "My ancestor left England," he
wrote, "in 1630. I return in 1853. I sometimes feel as if I myself had
been absent these two hundred and twenty-three years, leaving England
just emerging from the feudal system, and finding it, on my return, on
the verge of republicanism." Herein lay a source of romantic
possibilities from which he certainly meant to derive a story. But the
greater part of his four years in England was spent in Liverpool, where
his consular duties suppressed fiction-making. [Footnote: And it was not
till he reached the villa of Montauto at Florence that he could write:--
"It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America,--a
satisfaction that I never enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool,
where it seemed to me that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking
Yankee-dom was continually filtered and sublimated through my consulate,
on the way outward and homeward. I first got acquainted with my own
countrymen there. At Rome, too, it was not much better. But here in
Florence, and in the summer-time, and in this secluded villa, I have
escaped out of all my old tracks, and am really remote."]
Hawthorne's genius was extremely susceptible to every influence about
it. One might liken its quality to that of a violin which owes its fine
properties to the tempering of time and atmosphere, and transmits
through its strings the very thrill of sunshine that has sunk into its
wood.
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