ted admiration
impresses them as malicious caricature. But they do me great injustice
in supposing that I hate them. I would as soon hate my own people."
The idea of his hating the English was of course too puerile for
discussion; and the book, as I have said, is full of a rich
appreciation of the finest characteristics of the country. But it has
a serious defect--a defect which impairs its value, though it helps to
give consistency to such an image of Hawthorne's personal nature as we
may by this time have been able to form. It is the work of an
outsider, of a stranger, of a man who remains to the end a mere
spectator (something less even than an observer), and always lacks the
final initiation into the manners and nature of a people of whom it
may most be said, among all the people of the earth, that to know them
is to make discoveries. Hawthorne freely confesses to this constant
exteriority, and appears to have been perfectly conscious of it. "I
remember," he writes in the sketch of "A London Suburb," in _Our Old
Home_, "I remember to this day the dreary feeling with which I sat by
our first English fireside and watched the chill and rainy twilight of
an autumn day darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding
occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his
lifetime), scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as if
indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there.
Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his
abode as much a stranger as I entered it." The same note is struck in
an entry in his journal, of the date of October 6th, 1854.

"The people, for several days, have been in the utmost
anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation, about
Sebastopol--and all England, and Europe to boot, have been
fooled by the belief that it had fallen. This, however, now
turns out to be incorrect; and the public visage is somewhat
grim in consequence. I am glad of it. In spite of his actual
sympathies, it is impossible for an American to be otherwise
than glad. Success makes an Englishman intolerable, and
already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a
prosperous conclusion of the war, the _Times_ had begun to
throw out menaces against America. I shall never love
England till she sues to us for help, and, in the meantime,
the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all parties.