Hawthorne and Goldsmith: a Note

Extract

Remarkably enough, Austin Warren calls Hawthorne ‘the unallusive Hawthorne’, but a mere four pages later he deduces from ‘The Hall of Fantasy’ in Mosses from an Old Manse that Homer, Aesop, Dante, Ariosto, Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and Bunyan were ‘Hawthorne's pantheon of the greatest creators’ and that Fielding, Richardson, Scott, and even poor Charles Brockden Brown were among his favourite novelists. As a matter of fact, to today's casual reader Hawthorne's work appears rather generously sprinkled with allusions to other writers and works. In spite of George Augustus Sala's remark: ‘Nobody ever saw him read…A friend who knew him well told me that on his shelves Hawthorne had not twenty volumes, and that these were of the most ordinary sort’, Warren and others have established without doubt that Hawthorne was a voracious reader all his life. When he was a young man it was said of him, ‘He's read every book in the [Salem] Athenaeum’. Furthermore, when Hawthorne did quote an author or refer to him, he did so from actual knowledge of that author's works. The majority of his quotations and allusions Hawthorne carefully labelled as quotations and allusions; but, occasionally, either consciously or unconsciously, he quoted—or perhaps echoed—without attribution. To point out such a ‘quotation’ is the purpose of this paper.