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- another, and by an admirably graduated, growing comprehensiveness,
thrown into the allegorical fire, till, at length, nothing is left but
the all-engendering heart of man; which remaining still unconsumed, the
great conflagration is naught.
Of a piece with this, is the _Intelligence Office_, a wondrous
symbolizing of the secret workings in men's souls. There are other
sketches still more charged with ponderous import.
_The Christmas Banquet_, and _The Bosom Serpent_, would be fine
subjects for a curious and elaborate analysis, touching the
conjectural parts of the mind that produced them. For spite of all the
Indian-summer sunlight on the hither side of Hawthorne's soul, the
other side--like the dark half of the physical sphere--is shrouded
in a blackness, ten times black. But this darkness but gives more
effect to the ever-moving dawn, that forever advances through it, and
circumnavigates his world. Whether Hawthorne has simply availed himself
of this mystical blackness as a means to the wondrous effects he makes
it to produce in his lights and shades; or whether there really lurks
in him, perhaps unknown to himself, a touch of Puritanic gloom,--this,
I cannot altogether tell. Certain it is, however, that this great
power of blackness in him derives its force from its appeals to that
Calvinistic sense of Innate Depravity and Original Sin, from whose
visitations, in some shape or other, no deeply thinking mind is always
and wholly free. For, in certain moods, no man can weigh this world
without throwing in something, somehow like Original Sin, to strike the
uneven balance. At all events, perhaps no writer has ever wielded this
terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne.
Still more: this black conceit pervades him through and through. You
may be witched by his sunlight,--transported by the bright gildings in
the skies he builds over you; but there is the blackness of darkness
beyond; and even his bright gildings but fringe and play upon the
edges of thunder-clouds. In one word, the world is mistaken in this
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.
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