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- 1374
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- 1314
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- Nathaniel Hawthorne. He himself must often have smiled at its absurd
misconception of him. He is immeasurably deeper than the plummet of
the mere critic. For it is not the brain that can test such a man; it
is only the heart. You cannot come to know greatness by inspecting it;
there is no glimpse to be caught of it, except by intuition; you need
not ring it, you but touch it, and you find it is gold.
Now, it is that blackness in Hawthorne, of which I have spoken that
so fixes and fascinates me. It may be, nevertheless, that it is too
largely developed in him. Perhaps he does not give us a ray of light
for every shade of his dark. But however this may be, this blackness
it is that furnishes the infinite obscure of his background,--that
background, against which Shakspeare plays his grandest conceits,
the things that have made for Shakspeare his loftiest but most
circumscribed renown, as the profoundest of thinkers. For by
philosophers Shakspeare is not adored, as the great man of tragedy
and comedy:--"Off with his head; so much for Buckingham!" This sort
of rant interlined by another hand, brings down the house,--those
mistaken souls, who dream of Shakespeare as a mere man of Richard the
Third humps and Macbeth daggers. But it is those deep far-away things
in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in
him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality;--these
are the things that make Shakspeare, Shakspeare. Through the mouths of
the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says,
or sometimes insinuates the things which we feel to be so terrifically
true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper
character, to utter, or even hint of them. Tormented into desperation,
Lear, the frantic king, tears off the mask, and speaks the same
madness of vital truth. But, as I before said, it is the least part of
genius that attracts admiration. And so, much of the blind, unbridled
admiration that has been heaped upon Shakspeare, has been lavished
upon the least part of him. And few of his endless commentators and
critics seem to have remembered, or even perceived, that the immediate
products of a great mind are not so great as that undeveloped and
sometimes undevelopable yet dimly-discernible greatness, to which those
immediate products are but the infallible indices. In Shakspeare's
tomb lies infinitely more than Shakspeare ever wrote. And if I magnify
Shakspeare, it is not so much for what he did do as for what he did
not do, or refrained from doing. For in this world of lies, Truth is
forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by
cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakspeare and other
masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,--even though it be
covertly and by snatches.
But if this view of the all-popular Shakspeare be seldom taken by his
readers, and if very few who extol him have ever read him deeply, or
perhaps, only have seen him on the tricky stage (which alone made, and
is still making him his mere mob renown)--if few men have time, or
patience, or palate, for the spiritual truth as it is in that great
genius--it is then no matter of surprise, that in a contemporaneous
age, Nathaniel Hawthorne is a man as yet almost utterly mistaken among
men. Here and there, in some quiet armchair in the noisy town, or
some deep nook among the noiseless mountains, he may be appreciated
for something of what he is. But unlike Shakspeare, who was forced
to the contrary course by circumstances, Hawthorne (either from
simple disinclination, or else from inaptitude) refrains from all
the popularizing noise and show of broad farce and blood-besmeared
tragedy; content with the still, rich utterance of a great intellect in
repose, and which sends few thoughts into circulation, except they be
arterialized at his large warm lungs, and expanded in his honest heart.
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