Thus mankind, knit in brotherhood sublime,
Learn all that Art and Science can disclose—
“Who go to sea in ships”—their native right—
Deem all apparent danger pleasure and delight.
W. A.
REVIEW OF NEW BOOKS.
The Blithedale Romance. By Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed & Fields. 1 vol. 12mo.
In the first flush of a romancer’s fame, there is rarely any distinct recognition of the peculiar originality of his powers as distinguished from other great novelists, who equally fasten the interest and thrill the hearts of their readers. The still, small voice of analysis is lost amid thunders of applause. In the case of Hawthorne this mode of reception does but little justice either to the force or refinement of his powers. It is only when we explore the source of his fascination, when we go over the processes of his mind in creation, that we can realize the character and scope of his genius, and estimate, on true principles, the merit of each succeeding product of his pen. It is obvious to every reader that his mind is at once rich in various faculties, and powerful in its general action; that he possesses observation, fancy, imagination, passion, wit, humor; but a great writer can never be accurately described in those abstract terms which apply equally to all great writers, for such terms give us only the truth as it is about the author, not the truth as it is in him. The real question relates to the modification of his powers by his character; the tendency, the direction, the coloring, which his faculties receive in obeying the primary impulses of his individuality. This brings us at once to the sharpest test to which an author can be subjected, for it puts to him that searching query which instantly dissolves the most plausible bubbles—has he novelty of nature? Is he an absolutely new power in literature? It is Hawthorne’s great felicity that he can stand the remorseless rigor of this test. He is not made up by culture, imitation, appropriation, sympathy, but has grown up in obedience to vigorous innate principles and instincts seated in his own nature; his power and peculiarity can be analyzed into no inspirations caught from other minds, but conduct us back to their roots in his original constitution. Thus he has imagination, and he has humor; but his imagination is not the imagination of Shelley or the imagination of Richter; neither is his humor the humor of Addison or the humor of Dickens; they are both essentially Hawthorneish, and resent all attempts to identify them with faculties in other minds. His style, again, in its clearness, pliability, and melodious ease of movement, reminds us of the style of Addison, of Scott, and of Irving, in making us forget itself in attending to what it conveys; but for that very reason every vital peculiarity of it is original, for what it conveys is the individuality of Hawthorne, and there is not a page which suggests, except to the word-mongers and period-balancers of mechanical criticism, even an unconscious imitation of any acknowledged master of diction. This contented movement within the limitations of his own genius, this austere confinement of his mind to that “magic circle” where none can walk but he, this scorn of pretending to be a creator in regions of mental effort with which he can simply sympathize—all declare the sagacious honesty, the instinctive intellectual conscientiousness of original genius. Hunt him when and where you will—lay traps for him—watch the most secret haunts and cosiest corners of his meditative retirement—and you never catch him strutting about in borrowed robes, gorgeous with purple patches cut from transatlantic garments, or adroitly filching felicities from transcendental pockets. Inimitable in his own sphere, he has little temptation to be a poacher in the domains of other minds.
It is evident, if what we have said be true, that the criticism to be applied to Hawthorne’s works must take its rules of judgment from the laws to which his own genius yields obedience; for if he differs from other writers, not in degree but in kind, if the process and purpose of his creations be peculiar to himself, and especially if he draws from an experience of life from which others have been shut out, and has penetrated into mysterious regions of consciousness, a pioneer in the unexplored wildernesses of thought—it is worse than ridiculous to prattle the old phrases, and apply the accredited rules of criticism to an entirely new product of the human mind. The objections to Hawthorne, if objections there be, do not relate to the exercise of his powers but to his nature itself. His works are the offspring of that; proceed as certainly from it as a deduction from a premise; and criticism can do little in detecting any break in the links of that logic of passion and imagination, any discordance in that unity of law, which presides over the organization of each product of his mind. But we are willing to admit, that criticism may advance a step beyond this, and after conceding the power and genuineness of a work of art, can still question the excellence of the spirit by which it is animated; can, in short, doubt the validity, denounce the character, and attempt to weaken the influence, of the kind of genius its analysis lays open.