England multiplied books in a community which held letters in unusual
reverence. But the continuous work of subduing a new country, the
dependence upon the mother-land for general literature, and finally the
excitements of the Revolutionary period, deferred the opportunity for
any aesthetic expression of the forces that had been at work here ever
since Winthrop stepped from the Arbella on to the shore of the New
World, with noble manliness and sturdy statesmanship enough in him to
uphold the whole future of a great people. When Hawthorne came,
therefore, his utterance was a culmination of the two preceding
centuries. An entire side of the richly endowed human nature to which we
owe the high qualities of New England,--a nature which is often so
easily disposed of as meagre, cold, narrow, and austere,--this side,
long suppressed and thrown into shade by the more active front, found
expression at last in these pages so curiously compounded of various
elements, answering to those traits of the past which Hawthorne's genius
revived. The sensuous substance of the early New England character had
piously surrendered to the severe maxims which religion and prudence
imposed; and so complete was its suppression, that all this part of
Puritan nature missed recording itself, except by chance glimpses
through the history of the times. For this voluntary oblivion it has
been rarely compensated in the immortality it meets with through
Hawthorne. Not that he set himself with forethought to the illustration
of it; but, in studying as poet and dramatist the past from which he
himself had issued, he sought, naturally, to light it up from the
interior, to possess himself of the very fire which burned in men's
breasts and set their minds in movement at that epoch. In his own person
and his own blood the same elements, the same capabilities still
existed, however modified or differently ordered. The records of
Massachusetts Bay are full of suggestive incongruities between the
ideal, single-souled life which its founders hoped to lead, and the