And out of this questioning belief and transmutation of superstition
into truth--for such is more exactly his method--proceeds also that
quality of value and rarity and awe-enriched significance, with which he
irradiates real life until it is sublimed to a delicate cloud-image of
the eternal verities.
If these things are limitations, they are also foundations of a vast
originality. Every greatness must have an outline. So that, although he
is removed from the list of novelists proper, although his spiritual
inspiration scares away a large class of sympathies, and although his
strictly New England atmosphere seems to chill and restrain his dramatic
fervor, sometimes to his disadvantage, these facts, on the other hand,
are so many trenches dug around him, fortifying his fair eminence.
Isolation and a certain degree of limitation, in some such sense as
this, belong peculiarly to American originality. But Hawthorne is the
embodiment of the youth of this country; and though he will doubtless
furnish inspiration to a long line of poets and novelists, it must be
hoped that they, likewise, will stand for other phases of its
development, to be illustrated in other ways. No tribute to Hawthorne is
less in accord with the biddings of his genius than that which would
merely make a school of followers.
It is too early to say what position Hawthorne will take in the
literature of the world; but as his influence gains the ascendant in
America, by prompting new and _un_-Hawthornesque originalities, it
is likely also that it will be made manifest in England, according to
some unspecifiable ratio.
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