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- 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.
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 Shakespeare plays his grandest conceits, the things that
have made for Shakespeare his loftiest but most circumscribed renown, as
the profoundest of thinkers. For by philosophers Shakespeare 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 Shakespeare, Shakespeare.
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 Shakespeare, 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
Shakespeare’s tomb lies infinitely more than Shakespeare ever wrote. And
if I magnify Shakespeare, 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 Shakespeare and
other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,--even though it be
covertly and by snatches.
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