Did I say that Hawthorne was little influenced by his environment? It would be truer to say that the environment to which he responded was that to which most men are so strangely oblivious. He felt what another Salem mystic has expressed:
Around us ever lies the enchanted land
In marvels rich to thine own sons displayed.
The true-born Yankee has always persisted, in spite of the purists, in using “I guess” as equivalent to “I think.” To his shrewd good-humored curiosity, all thinking resolves itself into a kind of guesswork; and one man has as good a right to his guess as another.
It is a far cry from the talk of the village store to Emerson and Hawthorne, but to these New Englanders thinking was still a kind of guessing. The observer looks at the outward show of things, which has such an air of finality, and says, “I guess there’s something behind all this. I guess it’s worth while to look into it.”
Such a mind is not deterred by the warnings of formal logic that there is “no thoroughfare.” When it leaves the public road and sees the sign “Private way, dangerous passing,” it says, “that looks interesting. I guess I’ll take that.”
And from our streets and shops and newspapers, from our laboratories and lecture rooms and bureaus of statistics, it is, after all, such a little way to the border-land of mystery, where all minds are on an equality and where the wisest can but dimly guess the riddles that are propounded.
Hawthorne belonged to no school or party. To the men of his generation he was like the minister of whom he writes who preached with a veil over his face.
Nor is his relation in thought to his ancestry more intimate than that to his contemporaries. Born to the family of New England Puritanism, we think we recognize the family likeness—and yet we are not quite sure. There are traits that suggest a spiritual changeling.
When we enter into the realm of Hawthorne’s imagination we are conscious of sombre realities.