Walter Savage Landor is reported to have said
of an author whom he knew in his youth, "My friend wrote excellent
English, a language now obsolete." Had "The Marble Faun" appeared
before he uttered this sarcasm, the wit of the remark would have been
pointless. Hawthorne not only writes English, but the sweetest,
simplest, and clearest English that ever has been made the vehicle of
equal depth, variety, and subtilty of thought and emotion. His mind is
reflected in his style as a face is reflected in a mirror; and the
latter does not give back its image with less appearance of effort than
the former. His excellence consists not so much in using common words
as in making common words express uncommon things. Swift, Addison,
Goldsmith, not to mention others, wrote with as much simplicity; but
the style of neither embodies an individuality so complex, passions so
strange and intense, sentiments so fantastic and preternatural,
thoughts so profound and delicate, and imaginations so remote from the
recognized limits of the ideal, as find an orderly outlet in the pure
English of Hawthorne. He has hardly a word to which Mrs. Trimmer would
primly object, hardly a sentence which would call forth the frosty
anathema of Blair, Hurd, Kames, or Whately, and yet he contrives to
embody in his simple style qualities which would almost excuse the
verbal extravagances of Carlyle.
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