This book was written by a genius about a genius. It is, as stated at the front of the book, "an authentic reproduction of the text as printed by the original publisher," and may come as a surprise to some since the printing in 1880 was not what it is today. At first I found the font to be a minor annoyance, but soon entered into the spirit of the thing. Henry James wrote the book in real time looking back at the time of Hawthorne forty years before, (which would be 169 years back from today) but it seems when reading it as if he had written it yesterday.
I felt several emotions both towards Hawthorne and James. In parts James was patronizing, such as when he discusses Hawthorne's Notes, in "Early Manhood" Ch.2. "He appears to have read a good deal; and that he must have been familiar with the sources of good English, we see from his charming, expressive, slightly self-conscious, cultivated, but not too cultivated style." This was after he had scornfully criticized passages in which Hawthorne had written about a dog he had seen chasing its tail and about "the aromatic odor of peat smoke in the sunny autumnal air." This led me to believe that James was not always as objective in his critique as he intended to be. It showed especially in the last chapter where Henry James vents his displeasure to such a degree over the publication of "Septimius Felton," professing to know what Hawthorne would or would not have wanted after his death, that he sees it ONLY from his point of view. Hawthorne was a romantic, Henry James more of a realist, so certain things grated on James' nerves, such as for instance, "The Elixir of Life." James found it preposterous, "Indeed, this whole matter of elixirs and potions belongs to the fairy tale period of taste, and the idea of a young man enabling himself to live forever by concocting and imbibing a magic drought has the misfortune of not appealing to our sense of reality, or even to our sympathy." That should have read, `my sense of reality, or even to my sympathy' since it was purely his view, and others including his family and the publisher had a different opinion.
Henry James takes great care to impress upon us how much he admires Hawthorne, referring to him several times as a genius, but the two men were very different. Henry James seems to have enjoyed walking among people, Hawthorne was more of a recluse. James stands back mostly in an objective way to assess this shy sensitive man, but sometimes as I said, in a patronizing way. Perhaps it was that Hawthorne was woven from such fine thread, the finest silk, that he hid behind his shyness to keep himself aloof. His musings could be read as self-pity, he had not been discovered early enough, he never had enough money, some men would be bitter, Hawthorne licked his wounds. Hawthorne seemed to bear the weight of the sins of his forefather like a nail sticking up in his boot, but it was the very irritant which gave him the stimulus for his amazing creativity.
A very thought provoking book, highly recommended
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