Now, it is a mere truism to say that each of these
men was, in his way, a typical product of New England, inconceivable as
the offspring of any other soil in the world. Emerson, it has been said,
not without truth, was the first of the American humourists, carrying
into metaphysics that gift of realistic vision and inspired hyperbole
which has somehow been grafted upon the Anglo-Saxon character by the
conditions of American life. As for Hawthorne, though he has felt and
reproduced the physical charm of Rome more subtly than any other artist,
his genius drew at once its strength and its delicacy from his Puritan
ancestry and environment. To realise how intimately he smacks of the
soil, we have but to think of that marvellous scene in _The Blithedale
Romance_, the search for Zenobia's body. From what does it derive its
peculiar quality, its haunting savour? Simply from the presence of Silas
Foster, that delightful incarnation of the New England yeoman. "If I
thought anything had happened to Zenobia, I should feel kind o'
sorrowful," said the grim Silas; and there never was a speech more
dramatically true, or, in its context, more bitterly pathetic.
Even while English critics were proving that there could be no such
thing as an American literature, Washington Irving and Fenimore Cooper
were laying its foundations on a thoroughly American basis.
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