greater artist if he had been more richly supplied with the diet so dear
to his inmost soul? Was it not a thing to weep over, that a man so
keenly alive to every picturesque influence, so anxious to invest his
work with the enchanted haze of romantic association, should be confined
till middle age amongst the bleak granite rocks and the half-baked
civilisation of New England? 'Among ourselves,' he laments, 'there is no
fairy land for the romancer.' What if he had been brought up in the
native home of the fairies--if there had been thrown open to him the
gates through which Shakespeare and Spenser caught their visions of
ideal beauty? Might we not have had an appendix to the 'Midsummer
Night's Dream,' and might not a modern 'Faerie Queen' have brightened
the prosaic wilderness of this nineteenth century? The question, as I
have said, is rigidly unanswerable. We have not yet learnt how to breed
poets, though we have made some progress in regard to pigs. Nobody can
tell, and perhaps, therefore, it is as well that nobody should guess,
what would have been the effect of transplanting Shakespeare to modern
Stratford, or of exiling him to the United States. And yet--for it is
impossible to resist entirely the pleasure of fruitless speculation--we
may guess that there are some reasons why there should be a risk in
transplanting so delicate a growth as the genius of Hawthorne. There are
more ways, so wise men tell us, of killing a cat than choking it with
cream; but it is a very good way. Over-feeding produces atrophy of some
of the vital functions in higher animals than cats, and the imagination
may be enfeebled rather than strengthened by an over-supply of
materials. Hawthorne, if his life had passed where the plough may turn
up an antiquity in every furrow, and the whole face of the country is
enamelled with ancient culture, might have wrought more gorgeous hues
into his tissues, but he might have succumbed to the temptation of
producing mere upholstery. The fairy land for which he longed is full of
dangerous enchantments, and there are many who have lost in it the
vigour which comes from breathing the keen air of everyday life. From
that risk Hawthorne was effectually preserved in his New England home.
Having to abandon the poetry which is manufactured out of mere external
circumstances, he was forced to draw it from deeper sources. With easier
means at hand of enriching his pages, he might have left the mine
unworked. It is o