but tacitly resolved to see proofs of virtues present or to
come even in his clumsiest tricks. He forces his apologies to sound like
boasting. 'No author,' he says, 'can conceive of the difficulty of
writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no
antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but
a commonplace prosperity, as is happily' (it must and shall be happily!)
'the case with my dear native land. It will be very long, I trust,
before romance-writers may find congenial and easily-handled themes
either in the annals of our stalwart republic, or in any characteristic
and probable events of our individual lives. Romance and poetry, ivy,
lichens, and wallflowers need ruins to make them grow.' If, that is, I
am forced to confess that poetry and romance are absent, I will
resolutely stick to it that poetry and romance are bad things, even
though the love of them is the strongest propensity of my nature. To my
thinking, there is something almost pathetic in this loyal
self-deception; and therefore I have never been offended by certain
passages in 'Our Old Home' which appear to have caused some irritation
in touchy Englishmen. There is something, he says by way of apology,
which causes an American in England to take up an attitude of
antagonism. 'These people think so loftily of themselves, and so
contemptuously of everybody else, that it requires more generosity than
I possess to keep always in perfectly good humour with them.' That may
be true; for, indeed, I believe that all Englishmen, whether
ostentatiously cosmopolitan or ostentatiously patriotic, have a peculiar
type of national pride at least as offensive as that of Frenchmen,
Germans, or Americans; and, to a man of Hawthorne's delicate
perceptions, the presence of that sentiment would reveal itself through
the most careful disguises. But that which really caused him to cherish
his antagonism was, I suspect, something else: he was afraid of loving
us too well; he feared to be tempted into a denial of some point of his
patriotic creed; he is always clasping it, as it were, to his bosom, and
vowing and protesting that he does not surrender a single jot or tittle
of it. Hawthorne in England was like a plant suddenly removed to a rich
soil from a dry and thirsty land. He drinks in at every pore the
delightful influences of which he has had so scanty a supply. An old
cottage, an ivy-grown wall, a country churchyard with its quaint