d Italy.

Perhaps Hawthorne travelled too late, when his habits were too much
fixed. It does not become Englishmen to be angry because a voyager is
annoyed at not finding everything familiar and customary in lands which
he only visits because they are strange. This is an inconsistency to
which English travellers are particularly prone. But it is, in
Hawthorne's case, perhaps, another instance of his conscientious attempts
to be, what he was not, very much like other people. His unexpected
explosions of Puritanism, perhaps, are caused by the sense of being too
much himself. He speaks of "the Squeamish love of the Beautiful" as if
the love of the Beautiful were something unworthy of an able-bodied
citizen. In some arts, as in painting and sculpture, his taste was very
far from being at home, as his Italian journals especially prove. In
short, he was an artist in a community for long most inartistic. He
could not do what many of us find very difficult--he could not take
Beauty with gladness as it comes, neither shrinking from it as immoral,
nor getting girlishly drunk upon it, in the aesthetic fashion, and
screaming over it in an intoxication of surprise. His tendency was to be
rather shy and afraid of Beauty, as a pleasant but not immaculately
respectable acquaintance. Or, perhaps, he was merely deferring to Anglo-
Saxon public opinion.

Possibly he was trying to wean himself from himself, and from his own
genius, when he consorted with odd amateur socialists in farm-work, and
when he mixed, at Concord, with the "queer, strangely-dressed,
oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important
agents of the world's destiny, yet were simple bores of a very intense
water." They haunted Mr. Emerson as they haunted Shelley, and Hawthorne
had to see much of them. But they neither made a convert of him, nor
irritated him into resentment. His long-enduring kindness to the
unfortunate Miss Delia Bacon, an early believer in the nonsense about
Bacon and Shakespeare, was a model of manly and generous conduct. He
was, indeed, an admirable character, and his goodness had the bloom on it
of a courteous and kindly nature that loved the Muses. But, as one has
ventured to hint, the development of his genius and taste was hampered
now and then, apparently, by a desire to put himself on the level of the
general public, and of their ideas. This, at least, is how one explains
to oneself various remarks in his