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- him, being endowed with such power, to dwell day after day, and one long
lonesome night after another, on the dusky hearth, only now and then
betraying his wild nature by thrusting his red tongue out of the
chimney-top! True, he had done much mischief in the world, and was
pretty certain to do more; but his warm heart atoned for all. He was
kindly to the race of man; and they pardoned his characteristic
imperfections.’
But he has still other apples, not quite so ruddy, though full as
ripe:--apples, that have been left to wither on the tree, after the
pleasant autumn gathering is past. The sketch of _The Old Apple Dealer_
is conceived in the subtlest spirit of sadness; he whose ‘subdued and
nerveless boyhood prefigured his abortive prime, which likewise
contained within itself the prophecy and image of his lean and torpid
age.’ Such touches as are in this piece cannot proceed from any common
heart. They argue such a depth of tenderness, such a boundless sympathy
with all forms of being, such an omnipresent love, that we must needs
say that this Hawthorne is here almost alone in his generation,--at
least, in the artistic manifestation of these things. Still more. Such
touches as these--and many, very many similar ones, all through his
chapters--furnish clues whereby we enter a little way into the
intricate, profound heart where they originated. And we see that
suffering, some time or other, and in some shape or other,--this only
can enable any man to depict it in others. All over him, Hawthorne’s
melancholy rests like an Indian summer, which, though bathing a whole
country in one softness, still reveals the distinctive hue of every
towering hill and each far-winding vale.
But it is the least part of genius that attracts admiration. Where
Hawthorne is known, he seems to be deemed a pleasant writer, with a
pleasant style,--a sequestered, harmless man, from whom any deep and
weighty thing would hardly be anticipated--a man who means no meanings.
But there is no man, in whom humour and love, like mountain peaks, soar
to such a rapt height as to receive the irradiations of the upper
skies;--there is no man in whom humour and love are developed in that
high form called genius; no such man can exist without also possessing,
as the indispensable complement of these, a great, deep intellect, which
drops down into the universe like a plummet. Or, love and humour are
only the eyes through which such an intellect views this world. The
great beauty in such a mind is but the product of its strength. What, to
all readers, can be more charming than the piece entitled _Monsieur du
Miroir_; and to a reader at all capable of fully fathoming it, what, at
the same time, can possess more mystical depth of meaning?--yes, there
he sits and looks at me,--this ‘shape of mystery,’ this ‘identical
MONSIEUR DU MIROIR!’ ‘Methinks I should tremble now were his wizard
power of gliding through all impediments in search of me to place him
suddenly before my eyes.’
How profound, nay, appalling, is the moral evolved by the _Earth’s
Holocaust_; where--beginning with the hollow follies and affectations of
the world,--all vanities and empty theories and forms are, one after
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
symbolising of the secret workings in men’s souls. There are other
sketches still more charged with ponderous import.
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