n to suppose that this was less the case fifty years
ago; but fifty years ago, greatly more than now, the literary man must
have lacked the comfort and inspiration of belonging to a class. The
best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are
members of a group; every man works better when he has companions
working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion,
comparison, emulation. Great things of course have been done by
solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the
pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial
circumstances. The solitary worker loses the profit of example and
discussion; he is apt to make awkward experiments; he is in the nature
of the case more or less of an empiric. The empiric may, as I say, be
treated by the world as an expert; but the drawbacks and discomforts
of empiricism remain to him, and are in fact increased by the
suspicion that is mingled with his gratitude, of a want in the public
taste of a sense of the proportions of things. Poor Hawthorne,
beginning to write subtle short tales at Salem, was empirical enough;
he was one of, at most, some dozen Americans who had taken up
literature as a profession. The profession in the United States is
still very young, and of diminutive stature; but in the year 1830 its
head could hardly have been seen above ground. It strikes the observer
of to-day that Hawthorne showed great courage in entering a field in
which the honours and emoluments were so scanty as the profits of
authorship must have been at that time. I have said that in the
United States at present authorship is a pedestal, and literature is
the fashion; but Hawthorne's history is a proof that it was possible,
fifty years ago, to write a great many little masterpieces without
becoming known. He begins the preface to the _Twice-Told Tales_ by
remarking that he was "for many years the obscurest man of letters in
America." When once this work obtained recognition, the recognition
left little to be desired. Hawthorne never, I believe, made large sums
of money by his writings, and the early profits of these charming
sketches could not have been considerable; for many of them, indeed,
as they appeared in journals and magazines, he had never been paid at
all; but the honour, when once it dawned--and it dawned tolerably
early in the author's career--was never thereafter wanting.
Hawthorne's countrymen are solidly proud of him, and