Summary. It is hard to sum up the impression which such a writer makes. He was ideal, of course, in temper; he was introspective, with all the self-searching instinct of his ancestry; he was solitary; he was permeated with a sense of the mysteries of life and sin; and by pondering over them he tended to exaggerate them more and more. In a dozen aspects he seems typically Puritan. His artistic conscience, however, as alert as that of any pagan, impelled him constantly to realize in his work those forms which should most beautifully embody the ideals of his incessantly creative imagination. Thus he grew to be of all our writers the least imitative, the most surely individual. The circumstances of his life combined with the sensitiveness of his nature to make his individuality indigenous. Beyond any one else he expresses the deepest temper of that New England race which brought him forth, and which now, at least in the phases we have known, seems vanishing from the earth. When we ask what that race has contributed to human expression, we must not let our patriotism betray our judgment. The literature of New England is not supremely great. Of the men we have scrutinized Emerson and Hawthorne seem the most memorable. And Emerson has vagaries which may well justify a doubt whether his work is among those few final records of human wisdom. which are imperishable Scriptures. And, though Hawthorne's tales possess sincerity of motive and beauty of form, they reveal at best a phase of human nature whose limits are obvious. As we look back at the New England now fading into the past, however, we find in it, if not positive magnitude of achievement, at least qualities which go far to warrant the national pride in its utterances which we have loved to believe justified. For throughout, its literature is sincere and pure and sweet. The emigrants to New England were native Elizabethans,―stern and peculiar, but still temperamentally contemporary with Shakspere and the rest. In two centuries and a half, national experience forced English life and letters through many various phases, until at last the old country began to breed that fixed, conservative John Bull who has so lost Elizabethan spontaneity, versatility, and enthusiasm. In America, meantime, national inexperience kept the elder temper little changed until at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was aroused by the world-movement of revolution. Then, at last, our ancestral America, which had so unwittingly lingered behind the mother country, awoke. In the flush of its waking, it strove to express the meaning of life; and the meaning of its life was the story of what two hundred years of national inexperience had wrought for a race of Elizabethan Puritans. Its utterances may well prove lacking in scope, in greatness; the days to come may well prove them of little lasting power; but nothing can obscure their beautiful purity of spirit. For all its inexperience, New England life has been human. Its literal records are no more free than those of other regions and times from the greed and the lust, the trickery and the squalor, which everywhere defile earthly existence. What marks it apart is the childlike persistency of its ideals. Its nobler minds, who have left their records in its literature, retained something of the old spontaneity, the old versatility, the old enthusiasm of ancestral England. They retained, too, even more than they knew of that ardor for absolute truth which animated the grave fathers of the emigration. Their innocence of worldly wisdom led them to undue confidence in the excellence of human nature; the simplicity of their national past blinded them to the complexity of the days even now at hand, while the sod still lies light on their graves. We used to believe them heralds of the future; already we begin to perceive that they were rather chroniclers of times which shall be no more. Yet, whatever comes, they possessed traits for which we may always give them unstinted reverence; for humanity must always find inspiring the record of bravely confident aspiration toward righteous ness. |