It would
certainly be divested of the special charm of their other writing.
Imagine Dickens clearly accounting for himself and his peculiar traits:
would he be able to excite even a smile? How much of his own delicious
personality could Thackeray have described without losing the zest of
his other portraitures? Hawthorne has given a kind of picture of himself
in Coverdale, and was sometimes called after that character by his
friends; but I suspect he has adroitly constructed Coverdale out of the
_appearance_ which he knew himself to make in the eyes of
associates. I do not mean that Hawthorne had not a very decisive
personality; for indeed he had. But the essence of the person cannot be
compressed into a few brief paragraphs, and must be slowly drawn in as a
pervasive elixir from his works, his letters, his note-books. In the
latter he has given as much definition of his interior self as we are
likely to get, for no one else can continue the broken jottings that he
has left, and extend them into outlines. We shall not greatly err if we
treat the hidden depths of his spirit with as much reverence as he
himself used in scrutinizing them. Curiously enough, many of those who
have studied this most careful and delicate of definers have embraced
the madness of attempting to bind him down in unhesitating, absolute
statements. He who mastered words so completely that he learned to
despise their obscurity, has been made the victim of easy epithets and a
few conventional phrases.
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