called the importance of the individual in the American world; which
is a result of the newness and youthfulness of society and of the
absence of keen competition. The individual counts for more, as it
were, and, thanks to the absence of a variety of social types and of
settled heads under which he may be easily and conveniently
pigeon-holed, he is to a certain extent a wonder and a mystery. An
Englishman, a Frenchman--a Frenchman above all--judges quickly,
easily, from his own social standpoint, and makes an end of it. He has
not that rather chilly and isolated sense of moral responsibility
which is apt to visit a New Englander in such processes; and he has
the advantage that his standards are fixed by the general consent of
the society in which he lives. A Frenchman, in this respect, is
particularly happy and comfortable, happy and comfortable to a degree
which I think is hardly to be over-estimated; his standards being the
most definite in the world, the most easily and promptly appealed to,
and the most identical with what happens to be the practice of the
French genius itself. The Englishman is not-quite so well off, but he
is better off than his poor interrogative and tentative cousin beyond
the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and
hair-splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is always a
little of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson would have had
woefully little patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which
in Hawthorne was almost as much a quality of race as of genius; albeit
that Hawthorne has paid to Boswell's hero (in the chapter on
"Lichfield and Uttoxeter," in his volume on England), a tribute of the
finest appreciation. American intellectual standards are vague, and
Hawthorne's countrymen are apt to hold the scales with a rather
uncertain hand and a somewhat agitated conscience.

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