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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
symbolising 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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