American tone at large was
intensely provincial, that of New England was not greatly helped by
having the best of it. The state of things was extremely natural, and
there could be now no greater mistake than to speak of it with a
redundancy of irony. American life had begun to constitute itself from
the foundations; it had begun to _be_, simply; it was at an
immeasurable distance from having begun to enjoy. I imagine there was
no appreciable group of people in New England at that time proposing
to itself to enjoy life; this was not an undertaking for which any
provision had been made, or to which any encouragement was offered.
Hawthorne must have vaguely entertained some such design upon destiny;
but he must have felt that his success would have to depend wholly
upon his own ingenuity. I say he must have proposed to himself to
enjoy, simply because he proposed to be an artist, and because this
enters inevitably into the artist's scheme. There are a thousand ways
of enjoying life, and that of the artist is one of the most innocent.
But for all that, it connects itself with the idea of pleasure. He
proposes to give pleasure, and to give it he must first get it. Where
he gets it will depend upon circumstances, and circumstances were not
encouraging to Hawthorne.

He was poor, he was solitary, and he undertook to devote himself to
literature in a community in which the interest in literature was as
yet of the smallest. It is not too much to say that even to the
present day it is a considerable discomfort in the United States not
to be "in business." The young man who attempts to launch himself in a
career that does not belong to the so-called practical order; the
young man who has not, in a word, an office in the business-quarter of
the town, with his name painted on the door, has but a limited place
in the social system, finds no particular bough to perch upon. He is
not looked at askance, he is not regarded as an idler; literature and
the arts have always been held in extreme honour in the American
world, and those who practise them are received on easier terms than
in other countries. If the tone of the American world is in some
respects provincial, it is in none more so than in this matter of the
exaggerated homage rendered to authorship. The gentleman or the lady
who has written a book is in many circles the object of an admiration
too indiscriminating to operate as an encouragement to good writing.
There is no reaso