This is an inconsistency to
which English travellers are particularly prone. But it is, in
Hawthorne's case, perhaps, another instance of his conscientious attempts
to be, what he was not, very much like other people. His unexpected
explosions of Puritanism, perhaps, are caused by the sense of being too
much himself. He speaks of "the Squeamish love of the Beautiful" as if
the love of the Beautiful were something unworthy of an able-bodied
citizen. In some arts, as in painting and sculpture, his taste was very
far from being at home, as his Italian journals especially prove. In
short, he was an artist in a community for long most inartistic. He
could not do what many of us find very difficult--he could not take
Beauty with gladness as it comes, neither shrinking from it as immoral,
nor getting girlishly drunk upon it, in the aesthetic fashion, and
screaming over it in an intoxication of surprise. His tendency was to be
rather shy and afraid of Beauty, as a pleasant but not immaculately
respectable acquaintance. Or, perhaps, he was merely deferring to Anglo-
Saxon public opinion.
Possibly he was trying to wean himself from himself, and from his own
genius, when he consorted with odd amateur socialists in farm-work, and
when he mixed, at Concord, with the "queer, strangely-dressed,
oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important
agents of the world's destiny, yet were simple bores of a very intense
water.
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