EMERSON AND HAWTHORNE
ours, which, though we may never attain, it is yet a refreshment to look up to; and Hawthorne, not perhaps the greatest romancer in the English tongue, but certainly the purest artist in that sphere of fiction. Now, it is a mere truism to say that each of these men was, in his way, a typical product of New England, inconceivable as the offspring of any other soil in the world. Emerson, it has been said, not without truth, was the first of the American humourists, carrying into metaphysics that gift of realistic vision and inspired hyperbole which has somehow been grafted upon the Anglo-Saxon character by the conditions of American life. As for Hawthorne, though he has felt and reproduced the physical charm of Rome more subtly than any other artist, his genius drew at once its strength and its delicacy from his Puritan ancestry and environment. To realise how intimately he smacks of the soil, we have but to think of that marvellous scene in The Blithedale Romance, the search for Zenobia's body. From what does it derive its peculiar quality, its haunting savour? Simply from the presence of Silas Foster, that delightful incarnation of the New England yeoman. "If I thought anything had happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o' sorrowful," said the grim Silas; and there never was a speech more dramatically true, or, in its context, more bitterly pathetic.
Even while English critics were proving that there could be no such thing as an American literature,
173
