Text: Benjamin M. Woodbridge, “Supernaturalism in Hawthorne and Poe,” Colorado College Publications (Colorado Springs, CO), vol. II, no. 27, November 1911, pp. 135-154

[page 135:]

In an interesting essay on the Origins of Hawthorne and Poe(1), Mr. Paul E. More finds the source of the power with which these authors treat the supernatural in the legacy bequeathed to them from Puritan ancestry. None can deny that. their treatment is vastly more convincing than the crude efforts of the English or German school of horror romancers. Doubtless differences of race and environment must be taken into consideration in accounting for the superiority of the American authors in this field. Our forefathers struggled fiercely against foes seen and unseen; they had to conquer nature with her nearest children — the savages, — and after that the devil in still another guise-witchcraft and heresy. It is perhaps not too fanciful to suppose that the red men who held their war-dances in the dim recesses of the forest, thence to issue forth spreading fire and slaughter — a pestilence that walketh at noonday — were, for our ancestors, a tangible and visible symbol of the witches who were wont to meet Master Satan in those same solitudes and devise new mischief for the colony — a terror that walketh by night. Surely the constant dread of such enemies emphasized the sterner aspects of the religion of the Puritans, and made the spiritual world very real to them.

“Hawthorne,” says Mr. More, “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 [page 136:] of Mrs. Radcliffe's or Tieck's: the weird unearthly substance moulded by their genius is from the innermost core of the national consciousness.”(1)

Mr. More's criticism of Hawthorne is not new: it is generally agreed that by ancestry, temperament and environment, Hawthorne was admirably qualified for the sympathetic understanding of Puritan life and ideals. Taken as a whole, his creative work might be called the spiritual epic of that New England which he knew and loved so well. Scott and his disciples had revealed to what good purpose history, made picturesquely real and living again, could be used in fiction. In his Scotch novels Sir Walter had shown the artistic possibilities of a vivid and sympathetic portrayal of national life: Cooper, following Scott's methods, had written the romance of the American forests, and if he is concerned with little but flesh and blood adventure, Brockden Brown, under the influence of the English “horror school,” had thrown a halo of the weird and supernatural over stories of American life. Hawthorne knew how to portray Puritan character in its simple grandeur. He is himself a part of it: Puritan blood is flowing in his veins, Puritan environment has shaped his thought. Furthermore he is a consummate artist, both of technique and style. ‘Tis a far cry from Scott to the historical fiction of Mlle. de Scudéri and her group: it is no less far from Hawthorne to the Gothic romance of the eighteenth century.

He is well aware that the sources of his inspiration and of his strength come from his native hills. “In the little tale which follows, “ he says in the opening paragraph of The Three Fold Destiny, “a subdued tinge of the wild and wonderful is thrown over a sketch of New England personages and scenery, yet, it is hoped, without entirely obliterating the sober lines of nature. Rather than a story of events claiming to be real, it may be considered as an allegory, such as the writers of the last century would have expressed in the shape of an eastern tale, but [page 137:] to which I have endeavored to give a more life-like warmth than could be infused into those fanciful productions.” This is the story of a man, who, having in youth conceived that a great future lay before him, spent his life wandering through foreign lands in search of it, but found it only on his return to his native village. Is there not here, as elsewhere, for example in The Great Stone Face, a conscious hostile criticism of those, who, blind to the poetry and romance of their own lands, or of nature and life itself, must seek their inspiration in exotic scenes and artificial stimulants? It is true, that, like the romanticists, one of whose favorite exoticisms was antiquity, Hawthorne is irresistibly drawn toward bygone days — to Puritan New England — but it must be remembered that for him the present and the future “ are but the reverberations of the past. “

Among the Puritans, too, he found the truest sympathy with the belief in the spiritual world which formed so large a part of his own thought. Supernatural forces are more real to him than any material phenomena. “ The dominions which the spirit conquers for itself among unrealities become,” he says, “a thousand times more real than the earth whereon they [i. e., those who lack imaginative faith] stamp their feet. “ Hawthorne was one of those who possess the “triple sight “ which sometimes comes from blindness to material things. I would call him a Platonist, comparing his spirit world to the Platonic ideas. For him the material world is but a symbol, a projection as it were, of eternal ideas the spirit become flesh. With such a view of the supernatural, although fully realizing the opportunities it offers for artistic treatment, he will not employ it for its own sake. Like Dante's Canzionieri it will be the viands of the Banquet — the inner vision of the vates, and will bring into clearer relief some of the deeper truths of the human heart. Life and its mysteries are too sacred to be used for pyrotechnic display; there is a profound meaning beyond, and the artist's task is to bring this meaning within the comprehension of his fellows. Hawthorne's greatness is in no small degree owing [page 138:] to that “high seriousness,” the roots of which may surely be found in Puritan New England.

But like many teachers of men he had long to wait before his work received its reward. Bitterly he learned that those who lack ‘ imaginative faith’ are in the great majority, and there is probably much of his own experience in The Artist of the Beautiful. Owen Warland his spent his life in an endeavor to give form to his ideal of beauty, and has finally achieved it in a wondrous butterfly. This he carries as a gift to the woman — now the wife of a blacksmith — from whose love he had once hoped to draw his highest inspiration. His life long toil is crushed in an instant by the child of these earthly parents. “ And as for Owen Warland, he looked placidly at what seemed to be the ruin of his life's labor, and which was yet no ruin. He had caught a far other butterfly than this. When the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possessed itself of the enjoyment of the reality.”

Dante would have his works interpreted literally and allegorically, and he is at considerable pains in the Banquet to set forth the hidden meaning of certain of his canzoni. For those who have not eyes to see-who lack the ‘imaginative faith, — Hawthorne leaves open the Sibyl's ivory gate,’ through which issue deceptive dreams, and whoso will may take that road. Only an aged woman saw the maiden's corpse shiver when the minister's black veil hung down revealing his face to it alone, as he bent over the coffin.(1) Again, if “most of the spectators testified to having seen on the breast of the unhappy minister a Scarlet Letter — the very semblance of that worn by Hester Prynne — imprinted in the flesh * * * certain persons, who were spectators of the whole scene, and professed never once to have removed their eyes from the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was any mark whatever on his breast, more [page 139:] than on a new-born infant's. Neither, by their report, had his dying words acknowledged, nor even remotely implied, any, the slightest connection, on his part, with the guilt for which Hester Prynne had so long worn the Scarlet Letter.”

In another essay,(1) Mr. More discusses the idea of moral solitude as the result of sin, which pervades all Hawthorne's work. It may be interesting, at this point, to compare the Puritan romancer with A. de Vigny, who has perhaps given final expression to every form of romantic solitude. In him the mal du siècle appears under its most philosophical aspect. The underlying idea of his Chatterton is the solitude of the poet in a world of Philistines: the theme of Moise is the solitude of the “superman”; of La Colère de Sanson the solitude of the sexes : of La Maison du Berger the solitude of man in the face of nature: and finally in Le Mont des Oliviers it is “ le silence éternal de la Divinité. Sainte Beuve has said that the romanticist's despair is largely due to the loss of religious faith “ la grande absence de Dieu.” Hawthorne had felt that desolation, and it is characteristic of his deeply moral nature that he sought the cause, not in a cruel destiny which makes playthings of men, but there where the Hebrew thinkers had sought it: by sin is man banished from Eden; for sin is he condemned to wander with branded brows a stranger among his fellows. We may constantly hear again those ringing words, “ Cursed be the ground for thy sake.”

Hawthorne's affinities are with those rugged elemental minds in which the sense of awe before life's mysteries is not blurred. This feeling strikes deeper than the childish wonder of the romanticists, which is always more or less artificial and seeks in reverie an escape from thought; it is the reverence for what is beyond the utmost reach of human understanding — it is the fear of God. Mr. More has partially pointed out the parallel with one of these spirits — that great Puritan poet of Athens, [page 140:] whose doctrine of “satiety begetting insolence and insolence calling down the inherited curse of Até” is the theme of The House of the Seven Gables. But more important still, it seems to me, is that principle at the foundation of the Aeschylean philosophy-wisdom through suffering — which Hawthorne might have adopted as a motto for his work. The Marble Faun and The Scarlet Letter offer two striking examples. It is also interesting to note that in Aeschylus we find perhaps the most remarkable instances in all classic literature of the sympathy and harmony of nature with the moods of his protagonists. I am thinking especially of the untamed spirit of Prometheus and the wild crag against which he is bound : of his appeal to universal nature and of the nymphs, “old ocean's daughters “ who rise from the sea to comfort him. The surrounding landscape is as significant in Hawthorne's work as the heath in Hardy's Return of the Native. It is sown with the deeds of the living and haunted by the spirits of the dead.

Certain of Hawthorne's tales seem to imply a strange paradox in his thought. By sin man hides from him the face of his God, and raises a barrier to separate him from his fellows; yet from sin which is common to all men there is born a bond of kinship between them, and woe to him who disregards it . The most wretched of all men is he who is without human sympathy: and for those in whom it is stifled by selfishness is devised a punishment apparently suggested by a hideous scene in Dante's Inferno — a snake in the heart.(1) The wealthy young man-a constant guest at The Christmas Banquct is the most. miserable of all who year after year gather at that ghastly feast. He might even demand the place of the host-the skeleton with the cypress wreath and he could not be refused, for it is the right of the most miserable to occupy that chair. The young man has all that the world can give, but his eyes have never shed “lacrimae rerum” and human sorrow has never touched his [page 141:] heart. Ethan Brand,(1) the marble-hearted and Lady Eleanore's Mantle illustrate the same truth. As the old charcoal burner sits watching the kiln, he remembers his former innocence; “ with what tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterward became the inspiration of his life. “ He had found the unpardonable sin by making the intellect supreme and so deadening his heart that it “had ceased to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother — man, opening the chambers or the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment.” Lady Eleanore, whose mantle, “wrought by a dying hand,” had given her a beauty more than mortal, and then brought a plague which finally smote the proud woman herself, learned her lesson all to late. “The curse of heaven hath stricken me, because I would not call man my brother, nor woman sister. I wrapped myself in pride as in a mantle, and scorned the sympathies of nature; and therefore nature has made this wretched body the medium of a dreadful sympathy.”

Perhaps these two tales point the way, however vaguely, to the solution of the paradox already noticed. Man tasted the forbidden fruit of knowledge, even as Ethan Brand had done, and thereby lost his innocence; yet he is not utterly lost, provided he does not seek to withdraw himself from the brotherhood of his fellows. This is a “dreadful sympathy” since its foundations are in sin; yet by compassion for suffering man approaches Calvary. Hawthorne seems especially fond of depicting [page 142:] characters in which the brain has killed the heart. He has returned to this theme in the person of Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter, and in the old magician of Rappaccini's Daughter. Possibly he believed that he himself must suffer in the circle of Purgatory where that sin is punished.

These characters are interesting also as revealing the power, in Hawthorne's conception, of spiritual over material forces the triumph of mind over body. There are two stories of similar import of which I have not yet spoken. The first is The Grey Champion, who is the type of New England's hereditary spirit. Before this august warrior, Sir Edmond Andros, the royal governor, marching at the head of his troops to disperse a rabble of the oppressed colonists, sullenly retreats. “I have stayed the march of a king himself ere now, “ the old man replies to the nobleman's first haughty challenge. The second story is of a lady, who, having sinned against parents, husband and home, has sought refuge from her shame in a strange land. An old woman, whom I take to be the personification of a guilty conscience, meets her, and, revealing the awful consequences of her sin, leaves her lifeless in The Hollow of the Three Hills.

Finally there are two tales in the Mosses from an Old Manse which deal with supernatural forces in a different manner. I think the influence of Poe is distinctly visible in both form and content. Hawthorne's style, which in its restrained imaginative power and in a rhythm that seems in harmony with the mystic music of the spheres, is so admirably fitted for the high seriousness and profound insight of his work, here assumes an oriental luxuriance and brilliant coloring, while for once he seems to delight in supernatural agency for its own sake. The alchemist in The Birthmark with his morbid sensuousness and his command of occult scientific forces is distinctly a Poesque creation. Perhaps however, we may see in the denouement of the tale Hawthorne's answer to the romantic craving for a beauty more than mortal. In Rappaccini's Daughter we find the familiar cold observer and experimenter with men, but, although the old man pays the penalty of the life of his {page 143:] child, the story seems to have little more than a purely artistic purpose.

I have tried to show that the supernatural or spiritual world is as real to Hawthorne as the material, and that the two are closely united in his work. Their relation, to borrow one of his own figures, is somewhat like that of a thought and a deed, the one the outward form or symbol of the other. He perceives the working of unseen forces in tangible reality, and, penetrating to the depths of one, he finds the other. He portrays realities that men may see therein the underlying spiritual forces, and spiritual forces that he may throw a clearer and more searching light into the human heart. His view of life is intensely moral — and he finds ethical purpose behind the workings of both material and supernatural powers.

With Poe, on the other hand, we enter into an entirely different atmosphere. First of all, he was not a Puritan by descent. The family came over from Ireland about the middle of the eighteenth century, and his parents were strolling actors . His childhood was passed at Richmond, where his associations were with the less serious view of life characteristic of the South. He showed an early passion for strong drink, which, combined with an undeniable neurotic element in his nature, unites him, outcast and wanderer as he was, rather with the Bohemians, not to say decadents, than with the Puritans. There is much truth in Baudelaire's assertion that his native land was a prison-house for him. His work shows little interest in character, or the deeper problems of life; he delights in highly colored scenes-in vivid sensation for its own sake. Like Pater, he values experience itself, and not the fruit of experience; he would escape from the world into an exotic pays de chimères, and there “ dream dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” In short he belongs with those who “ on honey-dew have fed,” and who seek in opium dreams ecstacies that nature cannot give. Like his own Dupin he is “enamored of the night for her own sake. * * * * The sable divinity would not herself dwell with us always, but we could counterfeit her presence. [page 144:] At first dawn of the morning we closed all the massy shutters of our old building; lighted a couple of tapers, which, strongly perfumed, threw out only the ghastliest and feeblest of rays. By the aid of these we busied our souls in dreams — reading, writing or conversing, until warned by the clock of the approach of real darkness.” Poe's own attitude could hardly be better exposed; for him the realm of the supernatural is distinctly separate from reality — it is a refuge to which he would fly even with artificial wings in quest of “madder music and stronger wine.” In much of his best work — The Fall of the House of Usher for instance, the sound of the machinery and the scent of those “strongly perfumed tapers” are all too perceptible.

Rousseau tells us that he loved to get a dizzy sensation by leaning over the verge of a precipice. Again in a significant passage of his Confessions, he exclaims, apropos of certain poems of the tribe of Kubla Khan, which he claims to have composed during a delirious fever : “ O, si l’on pouvait tenir registre des rêves d’ un fiévreux, quelles grandes et sublimes choses on verrait sortir quelquefois de son délire!” It is this same spirit, found over and over again in the romantic school, which caused Joubert to call them “les amateurs de délire. “ Here is the beginning and we may see the latest terms of the progression in Baudelaire, Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde. Nothing, for these men, is too sacred to be sacrificed for the sake of a new sensation. Conscience is only one more string — one of the most precious surely — of an Aeolian harp; it shall sound with entrancing vibrations at the touch of crime and remorse.

Something of this spirit I find in Poe, and I would explain his superiority over the English “horror school,” first, in that he is a consummate artist, a true Parnassian; and second, in that the “innermost germ” from which he works is something marvelously like delirium tremens. His strong belief in the “unity of impression” which led him to condemn “long poems” is one of the mainsprings of the power of his tales. Gordon Pym is a good illustration of the way horror piled on horror palls before [page 145:] the end of a long narrative. Moreover, Poe is not, like the Gothic romancers, describing scenes and lands he has never visited. This sounds paradoxical at first, for the greater part of his stories are laid in no time. or place : the nearest approach we can ever make to the setting is medievaldom and “some dim decaying castle by the Rhine.” Horace Walpole might fill Strawberry Hill with as many coats of mail as be chose : his horrors ring as empty as the helmets on the wall. He could gain no admittance to that “City of Dreadful Night” which Poe knew as well as de Musset's Fantasio knew every crook and cranny of his own tired brain. From his earliest childhood Poe was an ecstatic dreamer, and in more mature life he had sailed through seas of opium to reach his pays de chimères.

His first work was a little volume of verse — “Tamerlane and other Poems” — published in 1827. These show strong Byronic influence, and also that tendency toward dream poetry so characteristic of the romanticists, which grew constantly more marked in his work. A love of ideal beauty in the romantic sense, of that “ beyond-the-world-beauty — appears from the beginning, and with it grows the passion for “strangeness in beauty,” sought in dreams ever more lurid and ecstatic. De Quincey, in the wildest flights of his imagination might have written portions of the poems as well as of the tales, and Poe acknowledged Coleridge as his master. The famous lyric To Helen (1831) celebrates the beauty of an ideal woman's face which is to be the guiding star of his life. This is perfectly natural romantic lyricism, though far from the austere views of the Puritans. Between it and the second To Helen, one of his latest poems, there are many which certainly place him under Joubert's definition.

Passing now to the tales, I wish to quote a significant paragraph from the Philosophy of Composition, which may serve as a prelude. “Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation — and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development invariably [page 146:] excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.” The author goes on to show that the most melancholy of topics is death, which is most poetical when allied to beauty. “The death then of a beloved woman, “ he continues, “is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topics are those of a bereaved lover.”

The work from which this citation is taken is an essay on the composition of the Raven. It follows point by point the raison d’être of every line of that poem with mathematical accuracy, and throws a significant light on the rest of his work. If we took him at his word, we should believe that his poems and romances were merely the products of a finely organized machine, without the slightest touch of the ‘ Divine Fire. ‘That, of course, we cannot do, but he has surely given us ample reason to regard his opium as something like machine oil. At best his spirit world is a most artificial night.

In accordance with the principle just stated, the master string of his lyre is tuned with death, and to an even greater degree this note permeates his tales. Not only in those of which it is the theme, as Ligeia, Morella, Eleanore, Berenice and The Oval Portrait, but its shadow falls over every one of his recognized masterpieces. His heroines are all moulded after a single pattern; they are not real, for he makes no effort to portray character; they are merely abstractions, called into being by his familiar, opium, to pass, like Helen, across the stage, dazzling the senses of this modern Faustus, and then to furnish forth a more sumptuous banquet for death. He says of Berenice: “During the brightest days of her unparalleled beauty, most surely I had never loved her. In the strange anomaly of my existence, feelings with me had never been of the heart, and my passions always were of the mind. Through the grey of the early morning — among the trellised shadows of the forest at noonday, and in the silence of my library at night, she had flitted by my eyes, and I had seen her — not as the living and breathing Berenice, but as the Berenice of a dream: not as a being of the earth, [page 147:] earthy, but as the abstraction of such a being: not as a thing to admire, but to analyze: not as the object of love, but as the theme of the most abstruse although desultory speculation.” These women are all tall, with raven hair and dark passionate eyes. He is constantly insisting on the “strangeness” of their beauty, and their lives are no less mysterious: all are deep in the study of some occult science, and upon all death has early set his mark. Poe is a veritable lover of death and reminds us irresistibly of Leopardi's Canzone, Amore e Morte:

(Destiny brought forth at a birth two brothers, love and death. The world below has nothing so beautiful, nor have the stars.)

The case is no better with his . heroes. I have spoken of the influence of Byron in his early poems, and like Byron he could draw but one type — himself. William Wilson, Baron Metzengerstein, Usher, and all the “I's” of his tales are formed in a single mould. They sprang from an old and noble family, with something neurotic in the blood; they are ecstatic dreamers, or men of violent and morbid passions of which the strongest is, in the last analysis, the search for strange sensations . They are invoked that they may bring that very treasure, if they have found it, to their creator. Many are cursed with the opium fiend and haunted by delirious remorse. We have tales of marvelous adventure, as The Ms. found in a Bottle or The Descent into the Maelstrom. The first may have been suggested by The Ancient Mariner, but here the message comes d’outre tombe with heightened color from death's seal upon it. Coleridge is said to have regretted the moral which he allowed Wordsworth to add to his poem. There is no ethical motif in Poe's story; he is interested only in the experiences and sensations of the hero during the terrific tempest and on the gigantic [page 148:] battleship. This vessel is “embued with the spirit of Eld” and its crew “glide to and fro like the ghosts of buried centuries. * * * * To conceive the horror of my sensations,” continues the luckless writer, “is, I presume, utterly impossible; yet a curiosity to penetrate the mysteries of these awful regions predominates even over my despair, and will reconcile me to the most hideous aspect of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onward to some exciting knowledge — some never to be imparted secret, whose attainment is destruction. Perhaps this current leads us to the Southern Pole itself.” The Ms. was cast into the sea as the ship was swallowed in the whirlpool. The Descent into the Maelstrom may be said to continue this adventure, for it describes the sensations of a man as he is whirled down such a gulf and then back to the surface. Again, in the Pit and the Pendulum, a victim of the Inquisition analyzes with something like scientific precision his mental state during the most horrible nervous torments . Bearing in mind the naturalists ‘ favorite simile for their artistic method-the surgeon at the operating table — we might give Poe the title of the naturalist of the unnatural.

One of the most famous among his juvenile poems is a sonnet To Science, on the old theme of its conflict with art — Science is there condemned as one

Later in life, Poe learned to extract the “honey of romance” even from science and Hans Phael [[Phaal]] sends down to weary men “such stuff as dreams are made of” from his aerial explorations.

The first of the tales of ratiocination, The Gold Bug, is particularly interesting as an illustration of Poe's treatment of a well worn theme — the search for hidden treasure. It is a favorite with Stevenson, who tells his stories with all a healthy boy's delight in the plot. Neither he nor his heroes care a straw for the gold: it is simply an excuse for putting to sea, [page 149:] under the Jolly Roger, as like as not, in quest of adventure — real flesh and blood adventure. Poe's interest is all in the riddle and the acumen with which the hero solves it. So in the detective stories — The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Rouget [[Roget]] and The Purloined Letter — the fascination is not in the crime, though there is a morbid emphasis on the physically horrible, nor in the execution of justice, but in the creation of a mystery, which the keenness and sagacity of his Dupin may unravel. Similarly the motif of Hop Frog and The Cask of Amontillado is a horrible and cunningly contrived revenge.

Poe deeply resented the insinuation that he was a disciple of Tieck and the weird German school. “Terror,” he said, “belongs to all countries and all times.” Without disputing this assertion, I may indicate some other traits which he shared with his Teutonic cousins. I have already noticed his love of the purely musical elements of poetry, on which the German romanticists insisted strongly. Again we find in Poe's lighter work that romantic irony, or self-parody of which they were so fond. For instance in The Angel of the Odd, The Spectacles and The Premature Burial he ridicules his own methods and his favorite type of hero. Mellonta Tauta — a nonsensical account of an aeronaut's excursion closes with the following comment: “I shall cork this Ms. up in a bottle and throw it into the sea. “ In the Thousand and Second Tale Poe has made over the denouement of the Arabian story-teller; the king's “conscience “ awakes, and suddenly remembering how long he has been married, he condemns his charmer to be “throttled” like her predecessors. Loss of Breath is an example of what Brandes(1) calls “ disintegration of the ego,” and it has its prototype in Adalbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl — the story of a man who has lost his shadow-and the numerous imitations of that work, as Hoffmann's Story of the Lost Reflexion. Finally the Doppelgängerei motif, so much exploited by the Germans, appears [page 150:] again and again in Poe's work — for instance in the Black Cat and William Wilson.

This romantic irony or self parody comes, in the last analysis from the never ending quest for new sensation. After running through the resources of their imagination, these weary decadents turn upon themselves and take delight in ridiculing their own gods. Doubtless an overdeveloped self- consciousness plays its part also; the author wishes to make manifest that his “ego” is superior to all its creations. Then, too, horror pushed beyond its limits ends in laughter, and for Poe, at least, horror is the keynote. Within this limited field he is supreme, but his horizon is narrow — he is far from seeing life whole.

Yet, to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, we must give him credit for abstaining from one field in which some of his disciples, as Baudelaire, loved to revel — I mean, sexual pathology. Whatever suggestions of this theme there may be in Poe are passed over rapidly and never developed. I should like to attribute this, by a reversal of that common apology of wanton rhymers “Casti mores, musae lascivae” to an Anglo- Saxon repugnance in handling such themes, or to reverence for some sacred memories of his own married life. I think it probable, however that the true reason is one which has been already touched upon — the unsubstantial nature of his characters. They are not flesh and blood, but whostly [[ghostly]] phantoms flitting through an opium dream. Their passions, like his own, are of the mind, and the purely physical horror in which he sometimes revels is merely a frame for the more fascinating terrors of the soul.

There remain to be considered some stories in which Poe comes into closer comparison and contrast with Hawthorne. I have said that the latter delighted in descriptive sketches of familiar New England scenes, as The Custom House or The Old Manse over which he has thrown a veil of poetry that can come only from a sympathetic and loving knowledge. When Poe describes, it is The Island of the Fay or The Domain of Arnheim with their gorgeous color and dazzling magnificence. [page 151:] They are as far as possible from any suggestion of the real world.

Again we have seen that Hawthorne was much interested in mesmerism, and the strange power of one personality over another, as for example, in The Scarlet Letter. He watches the use or abuse of this power and studies its effects on the characters concerned. Mesmerism appears constantly in Poe's stories, but his is a morbid interest in the phenomena of one of the “occult sciences.” In the Case of M. Valdemar this power is used to keep life in a body from which all consciousness has departed. The wretched victim cries with St. Paul for deliverance “ from the body of this death,” and the remains fall into loathsome decay as soon as the spell is lifted. The operator is merely trying an experiment to prove to the physicians his power of contending with death itself for the possession of a corpse. What condemnation would the creator of Roger Chillingworth pronounce upon such a treatment of this theme?

If in these stories the contrast with Hawthorne is more obvious than the similarity, the likeness is more striking, superficially, at least, in the tales of conscience. At first sight, indeed, The Black Cat, Metzengerstein, William Wilson, The Tell-Tale Heart and The Man of the Crowd seem quite in Hawthorne's manner. In all but the least of these there is a personification of conscience in some form or other, and in The Man of the Crowd, the wretched subject is trying in vain to escape from himself and the solemn contemplation of his guilt. He wanders tirelessly from one to another of his old haunts, seeking always human fellowship. I cannot help thinking of that solitary figure in The City of Dreadful Night who visits continually the ruined shrines of lost illusions:

Poe says of his protagonist : “This old man is the type and genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd. It will be in vain to follow: for I shall learn no more of him, nor of his deeds.” Surely it is in this story that Poe most nearly approaches Hawthorne, yet even here the “I” follows the stranger purely from curiosity and when that is satisfied, leaves him. In other words: ‘this phenomenon is called a troubled conscience. Mark it well; perhaps it may prove interesting.’ The same is true in an even greater degree of The Black Cat, William Wilson and The Tell-Tale Heart. In the Imp of the Perverse the act of a criminal in confessing his guilt is explained as the inspiration of that demon. Another manifestation of the same power is the following: “We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss; we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become mingled in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy [page 153:] of a fall from such a height. And this fall-this rushing annihilation for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination — for this very cause do we now most vividly desire it.”

I have ventured to make this very long quotation from The Imp of the Perverse for the significant light it throws on all the stories of confession. A comparison with Rousseau's sentiments on the brink of a precipice is not without interest. This is Poe's characteristic attitude,(1) and if there is the slightest relation here to Puritan thought, it is quite beyond my comprehension.

In closing, I wish to call attention to two stories, which, in subject and treatment, offer respectively a comparison and contrast with two of Hawthorne's. The first is The Masque of the Red Death, of which the original idea may be found in Shadow. In both these tales a company of merry-makers has withdrawn from the plague-stricken city. They are sworn to drown in riotous gaiety and festival every thought of the public calamity. Close locked within their palace doors, they have naught to fear. In other words they have withdrawn themselves from sympathy with human suffering, but no more emphasis is laid upon this in Poe's tale than in the light-hearted narrative of Boccaccio. His interest is in the richly decorated palace, which in turn serves only to heighten the contrast when the pestilence visits the festivities as an audacious masker, to smite first Prince Prospero and then his courtiers. Hawthorne, while sacrificing none of the artistic effects gained by Poe, has added a more human interest and profound ethical truth to his Lady Eleanore's Mantle. The second story to which I refer is Metzengerstein, where we find the working of a family curse and Doppelgängerei. Its parallel in Hawthorne is The House of the Seven Gables. As always Poe's attention is concentrated upon [page 154:] color and passion and maddened horror; the curse exists only to evoke the avenging spirits, and he has written melodrama, where Hawthorne's work approaches Greek tragedy in its chaste and sublime grandeur.

Perhaps neither of these men can be called truly classic; there is too great a predominance of the spiritual in Hawthorne to reach that perfect poise which is the glory of the ancient world. But of the two, bearing in mind Goethe's dictum,”All that is morbid and diseased, I call the romantic; all that is sound and healthy the classic,” there can be no doubt as to which shall sit on the right hand and which on the left.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 135:]

(1) Shelburne Essays, First Series. New York, 1905. in 12°.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 136:]

(1) Shelburne Essays, First Series-pp. 52, 53.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 138:]

(1) The Minister's Black Veil.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 139:]

(1) The Solitude of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Shelburne Essays, First Series, pp. 22-50.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 140:]

(1) Cf The Bosom Serpent, and Inferno, Canto XXV.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 141:]

(1) I recently came across an account by Jacopo Passavanti, a Dominican monk, of a charcoal burner's vision of the punishment of two guilty lovers. They tell their story and disappear “like a flash of lightning. “ (See D’Ancona e Bacci, Manuele della Létteratura Italiana, (Firenze, 1904, in 12 °, Vol. I, p. 496 ff. Boccaccio retells and caricatures the same story, but otherwise as far as I can learn, charcoal burners have not been especially favored with such visions.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 149:]

(1) George Brandes, Main Currents in XIX Century Literature, The Romantic Movement in Germany, New York, 1902, in 8°.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 152:]

(1) Life divided by that persistent three=LXX/333=210. Author's note.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 153:]

(1) cf. for instance, the above cited, Ms. found in a Bottle.