His utterances are modulated by the very changes of the air. In
one of his letters from Florence he wrote:--
"Speaking of romances, I have planned two, one or both of which I could
have ready for the press in a few months if I were either in England or
America. But I find this Italian atmosphere not favorable to the close
toil of composition, although it is a very good air to dream in. I must
breathe the fogs of old England or the east-winds of Massachusetts, in
order to put me into working trim."
But though England might be his workshop for books dreamed of in Italy,
yet the aspect of English life seems much more fittingly represented by
his less excursively imaginative side, as in "Our Old Home," than in a
romance. Perhaps this is too ingenious a consolation; but I believe we
may much better spare the possible English romance, than we could have
foregone the actual Italian one.
In "The Marble Faun" Hawthorne's genius took a more daring and
impressive range than ever before, and showed conclusively--what,
without this testimony, would most likely have been questioned, or even
by some denied--that his previous works had given the arc of a circle
which no English or American writer of prose fiction besides himself has
even begun to span. It is not alone that he plucks from a prehistoric
time--"a period when man's affinity with nature was more strict, and his
fellowship with every living thing more intimate and dear"--this
conception of Donatello, the fresh, free, sylvan man untouched by sin or
crime.
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