Text: Paul Elmer More, “Origins of Poe and Hawthorne,” The Independent (New York, NY), vol. LIV, whole no. 2811, October 16, 1902, pp. 2453-2460

[page 2453:]

WE are credibly told that in years not so very long past young women and even grave men used to read the Gothic tales of Anne Radcliffe with tense brows and trembling lips; and the essays of Carlyle still stand a voluble witness to prove how seriously the grotesque marvels of German romance were once accepted in England. Mrs. Radcliffe is no doubt read occasionally to-day, and the indefatigable Mr. Lang has even attempted to reinstate her in popular favor. But her most generous admirer could hardly aver that she was anything more to him than a curious amusement; the horror of her tales has vanished away like the moonlight she [column 2:] was so fond of describing. And as for Tieck and Wackenroder and all that dim romantic crew of Teuton Sturm and Drang — not even an Andrew Lang has arisen for them.

It is a matter for reflection, therefore, that in this country a new life of Hawthorne* should be something of a literary event and that there should be a sufficient public to warrant the issue of two new and elaborate editions of Poe;† for at first thought it might seem that both Hawthorne and Poe fall in the same class with those forgotten weavers of moonlight and horrors. What is it, indeed, that gives vitality to their work and separates it from the ephemeral product of English and German romanticism? More than that: Why is it that the only two writers of America who have won almost universal renown as artists are these romancers, each of whom is, after his own manner, a sovereign in that strange region of emotion which we name the weird? Other work they have done, and done well, but when we call to mind their distinguishing productions we think first of such scenes as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Raven,” and “The Sleeper,” or of such characters as Arthur Dimmesdale with his morbid remorse and unearthly sufferings, the dreamlike existence of Clifford, the hideous unexplained mystery of Miriam's wrong, and the awful search of Ethan Brand — scenes and characters which belong to the real world, for they appeal to a sympathetic chord in our own breasts, but which are yet quite overlaid with some insistent shadow of the fantastic realm of symbolism. [page 2454:]

Hawthorne ascribes the superiority of Nature's work over man's to the fact” that the former works from the innermost germ, while the latter works merely superficially,” and the same explanation may be given of the genuineness of his own work and Poe's in comparison with the unreality of Mrs. Radcliffe or Tieck ; the weird, unearthly substance molded by their genius is from the innermost core of the national consciousness. Their achievement is not like the Gothic novel introduced into England by Horace Walpole, a mere dilettante ; there is in them very little of that recrudescence of medieval superstition and gloom which marked the rise of romanticism in Europe, little or nothng of the knights and ladies, turrets and dungeons and all that tawdry paraphernalia, and, fortunately for their reputation, no taint of that peculiar form of sentimentalism which pervades the German Herzensergiessungen like the odor of Schiller's decaying apples. Their work is the last efflorescence of a tradition handed down to them unbroken from the earliest Colonial days, and that tradition was the voice of a stern and indomitable moral character. The unearthly visions of Poe and Hawthorne are the result of no literary [column 2:] whim or of unbridled individualism, but are deep-rooted in American history. Neither Professor Woodberry in his Life of Hawthorne nor Professor Harrison in his Life of Poe has, it seems to me, brought out with due emphasis these spiritual origins of a school of romance which is so unique in its way as to have made for itself a sure place in the literature of the world.

The name of Hawthorne carries us back at once to those grim days of his ancestor in Salem Village when for a season almost the whole community gave itself up to the frenzy of witch hunting. In the earlier days the superstitions of England were concerned chiefly with the fairy folk of hearth and field, a quaint people commonly, and kindly disposed, if mischievous. But with the advent of Puritanism came a change; the fair and frolicsome play of the fancy was discredited and the starved imagination had its revenge. In place of the elves and goblins of a freer age, instead of “ Robin Goodfellow, the spoorn, the man-in-the-oak, the hellwain, the firedrake, the puckle” and all that antic crew, the imagination now evoked the terrific specter of the devil and attributed to his personal agency all the mishaps of life. [page 2455:]

Hence it is that witchcraft became so much more prominent with the Reformation and reached its hight where Puritan feelings prevailed. On the one hand it was employed by the Roman Church as an aid in its exterminating fight with the Waldenses and other heretics — the good monks no doubt being easily persuaded, where persuasion was necessary, that the ascetic revolt against the office of the imagination in worship was of diabolic origin — and, on the other hand, the Protestants, and particularly the Puritans with their morbid horror of sin, were quick to accredit to the author of sin every phenomenon they could not understand. Withcraft, to be sure, is as old as history, and we need go no further abroad than the classic poets for tales of the most abominable night-hags. But there is this difference between such monsters as Lucan's Erichtho and the abortions of Christian demonology: Erichtho may haunt the sepulchers and breathe into the cold mouths of the dead the dark secret she would transmit to the Shades, but in the end she is only a product of the imagination brooding on things unclean and hideous; there is in the dread and repugnance she inspires no such added horror as that which the Christian felt at the thought of a soul leagued for infamous ends with the Prince of Hell and doomed as a rebel against God to everlasting tortures.

Considering the history of the Puritan emigrants we shall not be surprised to find these superstitions breaking out with peculiar virulence in the New World. Persecution and insult at home had not tended to soften their temper, nor did flight across a waste of perilous waters to a wilderness where everything was strange and unexplored bring light and cheerfulness to their imagination. In England at least their morbid intensity was to some extent modified by contact with the worldly life about them ; in their new home they were completely given up to the working out of their stern purposes. Terrors and difficulties only added fuel to their zeal. “Our faithers were Englishmen which came over this great ocean and were ready to perish in this wilderness,” says old Governor Bradford; and “with what difficulties [they] wrastled in going through these things, [column 2:] we may read in all our school books. It is easy to see how these hardships and these bitterly-won victories increased the sternness and unyieldingness of the New England Puritans, but perhaps we do not often consider the influence exerted on their imaginations by the wild country and wilder salvages, as they called the red men, that now engaged their attention. They no longer beheld about them the pleasant vales and green hills of Old England, which the long habitation of man had rendered almost human, but the vast and pathless forests of the wilderness, where nature appeared under a new and forbidding aspect. There is at the best something weird and uncanny about the great woods into whose depths the eye cannot penetrate and from whose interwoven shadows, especially when night has fallen and the ear has grown painfully alert, come forth at intervals sounds that seem to indicate the activity of some nameless secret life [page 2456:] within the darkness. What then must have been the feelings of the New England farmer as perchance he made his way homeward at sundown along the border of the gloomy forest. The kindly fancy of his ancestors who peopled the woods with mischievous goblins had yielded to his belief in the extended powers of evil. In these deep shadows he knew not but the very enemy of God might be lurking to lure him to destruction. It was no pleasant waldeinsamkeit he felt, such as romantic poets love to indulge, but awe and ghostly terror.

And this feeling was exaggerated by the actual savages who inhabited the woods. The settlers were for the most part thoroughly convinced that these poor, brutal denizens of the wilderness were under the special tutelage of Satan. In times of distress the colonists were ready to charge all their calamities to the machinations of an infernal conspiracy.

It is not strange, therefore, that when the delusion of witchcraft fell upon these people it should have assumed a peculiarly tragic aspect. They were dwelling in the midst of hostile demonic powers, and, feeling themselves attacked, they turned upon the enemy with all the strength and intensity of their souls. And how real and material the phenomena appeared to the bewildered onlookers may be gathered from this sulfurous account by an eye witness of the sufferings of one of the victims:

Were we to go no further than this episode of Salem history we should find it easy to explain by inheritance that mystic brooding over the dark and intricate effects of sin which the descendant of old John Hawthorne has made the substance of his romance, or to account for the realism that underlies the wild fantasies of Poe. And we need only to dip into Cotton Mather's voluminous record of the dealings of Providence in America to see how intensely the mind of the Puritans was occupied with unearthly matters and what a legacy of emotions approaching the weird was left by them to posterity. When the faith of these militant saints was untroubled it often assumed a sweetness and fullness of spiritual content that passed at times into rapturous delight. But always this intoxicating joy bordered on the region of awe — the awe of a soul in the presence [page 2457:] of the great and ineffable mysteries of holiness; and the life of Thomas Shepard, which Mather calls “a trembling walk with God,’ may not unfitly be taken to illustrate the peculiar temper of their religion. And if in the wisest and sanest of the Puritan Fathers this trembling solicitude was never far away, there were others in whom the fear of the Lord became a mania of terror. Consider what the impression on the minds of children must have been when in the midst of their innocent sport the awful apparition of the Rev. James Noyes stood before them and rebuked them into silence with these solemn words: “Cousins, I wonder you can be so merry, unless you are sure of your salvation! “ Consider the spiritual state of a young man, celebrated for his godliness, who could note down in his diary with curious precision: “I was almost in the suburbs of hell all day.”

Literature, in the true sense of the word, could not well flourish among a people who saw in the plastic imagination a mere seduction of the senses, and whose intellectual life was thus absorbed in theological speculation. To be sure, a good deal of verse was written and even printed in early Colonial days; but of all the poets of that age only one attained any real celebrity and has in a way lived on into the present. Michael Wigglesworth, the faithful pastor of Malden, where in the odor of sancity he died in 1705, is described as “a little feeble shadow of a man,” but his diminutive frame harbored a mighty spirit. His poems breathed the very quintessence of Puritan faith, and as such obtained immediate and extraordinary popularity. Professor Tyler calculates that in the first year of publication his “ Day of Doom “ was purchased by at least one in every thirty-five persons of New England; printed as a common ballad it was hawked everywhere about the country, and its lugubrious stanzas were even taught to children along with the catechism. As late as the year 1828 an essayist declared that many an aged person of his acquaintance could still repeat the poem, tho they might not have seen i copy of it since they were in leading strings, and in his own day Cotton Mather had thought it might “ perhaps [column 2:] find our children till the day itself arrives “ — which God forbid.

The strength of Master Wigglesworth's genius, in this picture of the “ Day of Doom,” is, as we should expect, devoted to those who

One after another the various kinds of sinners are arraigned at the bar and receive their due reward. Most hideous and most famous of all are the stanzas that describe the pleading and condemnation of unbaptized infants. As an expression of the grotesque in literature they are not without a kind of crude power; as the voice of a real and tremendously earnest faith they elude the grasp of a modern mind, one can only shudder and avert his eyes. We contrast with some curiosity and no little bewilderment the unflinching frankness of this earlier Calvinist with the shifting creed of a recent Calvinistic convention. Yet Wigglesworth, like the Presbyterians of to-day, had his moment of compunction for the poor souls who

he at least allowed to them “ the easiest room in hell!” Those simple words have of recent years acquired a certain notoriety through literary hand books; indeed, for naked and appalling realism of horror, when all is considered, it would not be easy to find a verse to surpass them.

Wigglesworth's rimes were, as we said, the intellectual food of the young, and some such strong meat would seem necessary to prepare them for the sermons that nourished their manhood. And at least one of these sermons, Jonathan Edwards's famous Enfield discourse on “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” has gained the unenviable reputation of being perhaps the most tremendous and unflinching enunciation ever made of the gloomier side of Calvinism. His picture of worldly men hanging over the pit of hell “by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready ever [page 2458:] moment to singe it and burn it asunder,” has become classical in its own way.

After the death of Edwards, in 1758, the heart of the country became more and more absorbed in the impending conflict of the Revolution. For a while at least religion and the terrors of damnation must give place to the more imminent peril of political subjugation. In New England that other phase of Puritanism, the spirit that had led Cromwell and his Ironsides to victory, and had established the liberties of the English constitution, came to the foreground, and for a time the political pamphlet usurped the place of the sermon. But even then literature did not entirely vanish; and now and then through the rasping cries of revolution one may catch a note of that pensiveness or gloom, that habitual dwelling on the supernatural significance of life which had come to be the dominant intellectual tone of the country. Indeed, it was this violent wrenching of the national consciousness into new fields which brought about the change from the old supernaturalism of religion to the shadowy symbolism of literature as exemplified in Hawthorne and Poe. We seem to see the beginning of this new spirit in the haunting pathos that throbs through the anonymous ballad of Nathan Hale:

“The breezes went steadily through the tall pines,

A saying, ‘Oh! hu-ush!’ a saying, ‘Oh! hu-ush!’

As stilly stole by a bold legion of horse,

For Hale in the bush, for Hale in the bush.”

Of all the gentlemen — and women, too — who wrote verse in those stirring times only one can lay claim to any genuine poetic inspiration. Philip Freneau, of New Jersey, has even yet a slight hold on the memory of the reading public, and would be more read and better known were his works subjected to proper selection and editing. Like all the other versifiers of the period Freneau was caught in the wild vortex of political affairs, and, against the protests of his truer nature as he himself avows, gave up the gentler muses for the raucous voice of satire. But here and there through his works we find a suggestion of what he might have accomplished had [column 2:] he fallen on better times. In him we catch perhaps the first note of the weird as it appears in our later literature, of that transition of overwhelming superstition into shadowy haunting symbolism. Not unseldom a stanza, or a single line it may be, wakes an echo in the mind curiously like Poe. Such, for instance, is the spectral beauty of that stanza of “The Indian Burying Ground,” whose last line, as Poe once pointed out, was borrowed intact and never acknowledged by Campbell :

“By midnight moons, o’er moistening dews,

In vestments for the chase arrayed,

The hunter still the deer pursues,

The hunter and the deer — a shade.”

A glance at the titles of Freneau's poems would show how persistently, when relieved from the immediate pressure of politics, his mind reverted to subjects of decay and quiet dissolution. In one of his longer poems, “The House of Death,” he has just failed of achieving a work which might have come from the brain of Poe himself. At the hour of midnight the poet dreams that he wanders over a desolate country: [page 2459:]

“Dark was the sky, and not one friendly star

Shone from the zenith or horizon, clear,

Mist sate upon the woods, and darkness rode

In her black chariot, with a wild career.

 

“And from the woods the late resounding note

Issued of the loquacious whip-poor-will,

Hoarse, howling dogs, and nightly roving wolves

Clamour’d from far off cliffs invisible.”

At last he finds himself in the presence of “a noble dome raised fair and high,” standing in the midst of “a mournful garden of autumnal hue: “

“The poppy there, companion to repose,

Displayed her blossoms that began to fall,

And here the purple amaranthus rose

With mint strong scented, for the funeral.”

In this strange spot, which has something of the unearthly qualities of Rappaccini's garden or Poe's spectral landscapes, stands the desolate home of a young man whose beloved consort death has recently snatched away, and who now harbors as a guest the grisly person of Death himself. Death, stretched on the couch and surrounded by ghoulish phantoms, lies dying, but over the conversation that ensues and the blasphemies of the ghostly sufferer we may pass without delaying.

Between the period of the Revolution and the period that may be called the New England renaissance not much was written which has the distinct mark of the American temperament. Yet it is a [column 2:] significant fact that Charles Brockden Brown's “ Wieland,” published in 1798, the first novel of the first American novelist, should be built upon a theme as weird and as steeped in “ thrilling melancholy,” to use Brown's own words, as anything in the later work of Hawthorne or Poe; and in the proper place it would not be uninteresting to show how far, in his imperfect way, Brown anticipates the very methods and tricks of his greater followers. His immediate inspiration comes no doubt from the mystery-mongering novels then so popular in England, but despite the crudeness of a provincial style there does run through the weird unreality of Brown's pages a note of sincerity, the tongue and accents of a man to whom such themes are a native inheritance, lending to his work a sustained interest, which I for my part fail to find in the “Castle of Otranto” or the “Mysteries of Udolpho.”

Necessarily this age-long contemplation of things unearthly, this divorcing of the imagination from the fair and blithe harmonies of life to fasten upon the somber effects of guilt and reprobation, this constant meditation on death and decay — necessarily all these exerted a powerful influence on literature when the renaissance appeared in New: England and as a sort of reflection in the rest of the country. So, I think, it happened that out of that famous group of men who really created American literature [page 2460:] the only two to attain perfection of form in the higher field of the imagination were writers whose minds were absorbed by the weirder phenomena of life. But it must not be inferred thence that the spirit of Hawthorne and Poe was identical with that of Michael Wigglesworth and Jonathan Edwards. With the passage of time the unquestioning, unflinching faith and vision of those heroic men dissolved away. Already in Freneau, himself born of a Huguenot family, a change is noticeable; that which to the earlier Fathers was a matter of infinite concern, that which to them was more real and urgent than the breath of life, becomes now chiefly an intoxicant of the [column 2:] imagination, and in another generation the transition is complete.

It is this precisely that we understand by the term “weird” — not the veritable vision of unearthly things, but the peculiar half-vision inherited by the soul when faith has waned and the imagination prolongs the old sensations in a shadowy involuntary life of its own; and herein too lies the field of true and effective symbolism. If Hawthorne and Poe, as we think, possess an element of force and realism such as Tieck and the German school utterly lack, it is because they write from the depths of this profound moral experience of their people.

NEW YORK CITY.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 2453, column 2:]

* NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE. By George E. Woodberry. [American Men of Letters.] Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. $1.10 net.

† Published respectively by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co, and by G. P. Putnam's Sons.