Not that any period is to be distinctly
colored by the peculiar dye in which his own pages are dipped; but the
renewed tradition of a highly organized yet simple style, and still more
the masculine tenderness and delicacy of thought and the fine adjustment
of aesthetic and ethical obligations, the omnipresent truthfulness which
he carries with him, may be expected to become a constituent part of
very many minds widely opposed among themselves. I believe there is no
fictionist who penetrates so far into individual consciences as
Hawthorne; that many persons will be found who derive a profoundly
religious aid from his unobtrusive but commanding sympathy. In the same
way, his sway over the literary mind is destined to be one of no
secondary degree. "Deeds are the offspring of words," says Heine;
"Goethe's pretty words are childless." Not so with Hawthorne's.
Hawthorne's repose is the acme of motion; and though turning on an axis
of conservatism, the radicalism of his mind is irresistible; he is one
of the most powerful because most unsuspected revolutionists of the
world. Therefore, not only is he an incalculable factor in private
character, but in addition his unnoticed leverage for the thought of the
age is prodigious. These great abilities, subsisting with a temper so
modest and unaffected, and never unhumanized by the abstract enthusiasm
for art, place him on a plane between Shakespere and Goethe. With the
universality of the first only just budding within his mind, he has not
so clear a response to all the varying tones of lusty human life, and
the individuality in his utterance amounts, at particular instants, to
constraint.
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