An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character;
he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper
conception of himself.... I seem to myself like a spy or
traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I
neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they
look at me in full confidence of sympathy. Their heart
'knoweth its own bitterness,' and as for me, being a
stranger and an alien, I 'intermeddle not with their joy.'"

This seems to me to express very well the weak side of Hawthorne's
work--his constant mistrust and suspicion of the society that surrounded
him, his exaggerated, painful, morbid national consciousness. It is, I
think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most
self-conscious people in the world, and the most addicted to the belief
that the other nations of the earth are in a conspiracy to undervalue
them. They are conscious of being the youngest of the great nations, of
not being of the European family, of being placed on the circumference
of the circle of civilisation rather than at the centre, of the
experimental element not having as yet entirely dropped out of their
great political undertaking. The sense of this relativity, in a word,
replaces that quiet and comfortable sense of the absolute, as regards
its own position in the world, which reigns supreme in the British and
in the Gallic genius. Few persons, I think, can have mingled much with
Americans in Europe without having made this reflection, and it is in
England that their habit of looking askance at foreign institutions--of
keeping one eye, as it were, on the American personality, while with the
other they contemplate these objects--is most to be observed. Add to
this that Hawthorne came to England late in life, when his habits, his
tastes, his opinions, were already formed, that he was inclined to look
at things in silence and brood over them gently, rather than talk about
them, discuss them, grow acquainted with them by action; and it will be
possible to form an idea of our writer's detached and critical attitude
in the country in which it is easiest, thanks to its aristocratic
constitution, to the absence of any considerable public fund of
entertainment and diversion, to the degree in which the inexhaustible
beauty and interest of the place are private property, demanding
constantly a special introduction--in the country in which, I say, it is