Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 1804-1864; Novelists, American -- 19th century -- Biography
It must be acknowledged that the manners and institutions of the
country, and its people for the most part, were little to Hawthorne's
taste, and he showed this in his book about them; but, for all that, he
found the country interesting and often lovely in its picturesque
antiquity and softnesses of light and color, and he appreciated to the
full the literary and historical sentiment that most appeals to
Americans of like education and breeding. He made many excursions in
different parts of England, and visited Scotland and the Isle of Man,
and he lingered in many towns and villages and was disposed to haunt old
places with a pilgrim devotion. He loved the face of the country, too,
and notwithstanding its misted and dreary skies, especially over
Liverpool, he found some good words for its weather, its seasons, its
long days, and all its out-door look. He went about with the mind and
senses of a tourist, satiating his instincts for minute and detailed
observation and writing it all down; in a spirit, too, of enjoyment and
discovery; and out of this satisfaction of his inveterate habits of
observing and noting and walking about with no other end in view, just
as if he were taking an autumn stroll in Salem, came the felicity of the
English notes, which after all deductions is very great in its own field
of delicate sentiment and realistic grasp and the atmosphere of a mind.
Hawthorne was thoroughly happy in indulging his wandering propensity in
such voyages of discovery; especially in London he found a city that
satisfied his idea of it, and he seems to have busied himself there for
days and weeks in merely going about from point to point and seeing the
spectacle of its vast and varied life. Hawthorne's English experiences
will, perhaps, be best realized, if he is thought of apart from
literature, as a man much identified with the shipping interests and
commercial society of Liverpool, and attending to this business rather
doggedly and wearily, not especially liking the place or the people,
whose ways and notions he was instinctively against, being himself a
settled New Englander of a strong race type; and yet, besides this, a
man who managed in his four years' residence to see a great deal of the
length and breadth of England, as a summer tourist might visit its
shrines on pilgrimage. This describes his life, nevertheless, only from
the outside; as soon as one opens his note-books, his personality
changes the impression, and pervades even his least sympathetic pages
with a human quality that wins on the reader in spite of all
reservations, and one sees how in the face of his prejudices and
limitations England was saved to him by his literary faculty, the
interests, susceptibilities, and powers that were his as a man of
letters. One finds in his experience, too, besides the consul and the
man of letters, a kindly and simple manhood of a more primitive element,
the human heart in its own original right, as in the well-known incident
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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