….Poe represents the
newer, more disillusioned, and more technically finished of the weird schools
that rose out of this propitious milieu. Another school — the tradition of
moral values, gentle restraint, and mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or
less with the whimsical — was represented by another famous, misunderstood, and
lonely figure in American letters — the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne,
scion of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the old
witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the daring, the
high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic malignity, and the
undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here, instead, is a gentle soul
cramped by the Puritanism of early New England; shadowed and wistful, and
grieved at an unmoral universe which everywhere transcends the conventional
patterns thought by our forefathers to represent divine and immutable law.
Evil, a very real force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and
conquering adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theatre of
infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen half-existent influences hovering over it
and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding the destinies of the
hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded population. The heritage of
American weirdness was his to a most intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng
of vague specters behind the common phenomena of life; but he was not
disinterested enough to value impressions, sensations, and beauties of
narration for their own sake. He must needs weave his phantasy into some
quietly melancholy fabric of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly
resigned cynicism may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human
race which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into its
hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primarily object with
Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his personality that
he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius when he calls upon the
unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he wishes to preach.
Hawthorne’s intimations
of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and restrained, may be traced throughout
his work. The mood that produced them found one delightful vent in the
Teutonised retelling of classic myths for children contained in A Wonder Book
and Tanglewood Tales, and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain
strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not meant to be
actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel Dr. Grimshawe’s
Secret, which invests with a peculiar sort of repulsion a house existing to
this day in Salem, and abutting on the ancient Charter Street Burying Ground.
In The Marble Faun, whose design was sketched out in an Italian villa reputed
to be haunted, a tremendous background of genuine phantasy and mystery
palpitates just beyond the common reader’s sight; and glimpses of fabulous
blood in mortal veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot
help being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory,
anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which has caused the modern
writer D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly
undignified manner. Septimius Felton, a posthumous novel whose idea was to have
been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished Dolliver Romance, touches
on the Elixir of Life in a more or less capable fashion whilst the notes for a
never-written tale to be called The Ancestral Footstep show what Hawthorne
would have done with an intensive treatment of an old English superstition —
that of an ancient and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as
they walked-which appears incidentally in both Septimius Felton and Dr.
Grimshawe’s Secret.
Many of Hawthorne’s
shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of atmosphere or of incident, to a
remarkable degree. Edward Randolph’s Portrait, in Legends of the Province
House, has its diabolic moments. The Minister’s Black Veil (founded on an
actual incident) and The Ambitious Guest imply much more than they state, whilst
Ethan Grand — a fragment of a longer work never completed — rises to genuine
heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill country and the
blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation of the Byronic “unpardonable
sinner,” whose troubled life ends with a peal of fearful laughter in the night
as he seeks rest amidst the flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne’s notes
tell of weird tales he would have written had he lived longer — an especially
vivid plot being that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now and then
in public assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go
from a very ancient grave.
....But Hawthorne left
no well-defined literary posterity. His mood and attitude belonged to the age
which closed with him, and it is the spirit of Poe — who so clearly and
realistically understood the natural basis of the horror-appeal and the correct
mechanics of its achievement — which survived and blossomed.
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