This, however, is a mere skeleton
statement: the noblest element in his mood is that he believes with his
heart. A good interpreter has said that he _feels_ with his _brain_, and
_thinks_ with his _heart_, to show the completeness with which he
mingled the two elements in his meditations on existence. A warm, pure,
living sympathy pervaded all his analysis of mankind, without which that
analysis would have taken no hold upon us. It is a crude view which
reckons him to have been wanting in moral enthusiasm: he had not that
kind which can crush out sympathy with suffering, for the sake of
carrying out an idea. Perhaps in some cases this was a fault; but one
cannot dwell on the mistaken side of such a phase, when it possesses
another side so full of beneficent aid to humanity. And it must be
remembered that with all this susceptibility, he was not a suffering
poet, like Shelley, but distinctly an endurer. His moral enthusiasm was
deeper than that of any scheme or system.
His distaste for society has been declared to proceed from the fact
that, when he once became interested in people, he could no longer
chemically resolve them into material for romance. But this assumption
is also erroneous; for Hawthorne, if he felt it needful, could bring to
bear upon his best friends the same qualitative measuring skill that he
exercised on any one. I do not doubt that he knew where to place his
friends and acquaintance in the scale of relative excellence. All of us
who have not an equal analytic power with his own can at least reverence
his discretion so far as to believe that he had stand-points not open to
every one, from which he took views often more essentially just than if
he had assumed a more sweeping estimate.
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