Text: George D. Latimer, “The Tales of Poe and Hawthorne,” New England Magazine (Boston, MA), ns. vol. 30, no. 6, August 1904, pp. 692-703

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A COMPARATIVE study of the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and of Nathaniel Hawthorne is naturally suggested by a certain basic resemblance, both in the personality of the men and in the character of their work. They were Americans, contemporaries, writers of fiction, men of fine imaginative power, whose tales have been widely translated, and each is recognized as a man of genius holding a permanent place in English literature.

Such a study is perhaps inevitable when the nature of their work is considered. They have had the same inspiration. It is the abnormal that has appealed to them, the abnormal in life and character. They have mined in the veins of the weird, the gruesome, the morbid, in those psychologically obscure strata of our personality. They had but slight interest in the delineation of open, cheerful, lovable characters such as Scott, Thackeray and Dickens chose to depict. If they represented a sunny nature it was to serve as a foil to some perplexed spirit around which their imagination played, as the radiant Hilda in The Marble Faun intensifies the shadow in which Miriam and Donatello move. Fiction is always in search of the exceptional in character and action. For these writers, it was the exceptional as regards certain abnormal mental states. diseased imagination, some hidden crime, the fear that cannot be shaken off, gnawing remorse, delirium, expiation, — all this [column 2:] obscure region of the soul they chose for their literary rambles.

There is an impressive scene in The Blithedale Romance where Miles Coverdale comes upon the magnificent Zenobia just as the egotistic philanthropist Hollingsworth has confronted her with her victim, the shrinking Priscilla, and has spoken the words that forever separate the proud woman from the man she loves. To Coverdale, whom we suspect to be a portrait of Hawthorne, the angry Zenobia says: “This longwhile past you have been following up your game, groping for human emotions in the dark corners of the heart.” Certainly that sentence describes the permanent interest of both Poe and Hawthorne. They were groping in the dark corners of the heart. And because they were exploring those recesses where even self-analysis is difficult, where instincts rather than reason are a guide, where human freedom and impersonal destiny are inextricably entangled, where the natural shades into the supernatural, they set their wretched victims in an external world of sympathetic gloom; sometimes it was a poetic, deepening twilight; sometimes, the denser shadow of midnight. They might be called the Rembrandts of literature, great artists of chiaroscuro.

This is the common ground upon which they stand. Their rare imagination found its challenge in the melancholy, the weird, the morbid, the horrible. Our hidden passions, our secret fears, our morbid desires, [page 693:] our sins, our crimes, our remorse, our atonement — all this tragic aspect of life profoundly interested them. In their studies each showed himself a rare craftsman, an artist of the abnormal it is true, but certainly a man who knew and loved what was beautiful in literary workmanship.

Despite this basal resemblance, however, we could not mistake a tale of the one for a tale of the other writer. We have these two sets of studies in the abnormal. The fundamental likeness brings out the differences; with an equal inspiration and with equal art they produced widely contrasted effects.

Two of the short stories will serve us as an admirable basis for the comparison. In The Lady Eleanore's Mantle and The Masque of the Red Death the central incident is the same, while the treatment and final impression are radically different. Each tale is of the appearance of a pestilence among a gay company. In Hawthorne's story the plague is brought to the Province House in the gorgeous red mantle of Lady Eleanore, the young, rich, beautiful, titled ward of Colonel Shute, the governor of Massachusetts Bay. Soon after her arrival in Boston a splendid ball is given in her honor, when this proud beauty, resplendent in her scarlet attire, shows the first symptoms of the disease that a few days later ravages the community, and which disappears only when the richly embroidered mantle is burned.

In the other tale, Prince Prospero shuts himself, with a thousand guests, in the seclusion of one of his castellated abbeys — while his dominions are devastate] by the plague. In idleness, provided with all the resources of pleasure, unmindful [column 2:] of the destruction that wasteth at noon day, the gay company pass the period of enforced seclusion. In the sixth month the Prince gives a ball of unusual splendor in the great suite of seven rooms with their bizarre decoration. It is a time of license and each comes in the costume his taste selects. But one guest has exceeded the license of the hour and personates The Red Death. While the terror-stricken company shrink from contact with the ghastly figure, the offended Prince pursues it from room to room until they meet in the last chamber. Then he raises his dagger and rushes upon the masque only to drop dead at its feet. Then the guests, forgetting their horror, throw themselves upon the mummer and angrily tear off the cerements of the grave and the corpselike mask only to find them untenanted by any tangible form. It is the Red Death itself that has appeared in their midst, and “one by one dropped the revellers in the blood bedewed halls of their revels and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.”

Each writer is aiming for the same effect. The lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh, and the pride of life are set in sharp contrast with a ghastly, revolting, disfiguring death. It is a dramatic situation that constantly appeals to the author, one, we may be certain, that especially impressed these students of the morbid. When we analyze these characteristic tales the first and by far the most important distinction we note is that Hawthorne has given us a moral apologue, while Poe has simply painted an impressive picture. The Lady Eleanore is a haughty creature whose scorn has driven her humble lover crazy. The [page 694:] scarlet mantle typifies her pride as well as enhances her beauty. It is made a righteous punishment that this magnificent garment should scatter the seeds of a disease fatal to herself and others. When her lover forces his way into the darkened room of the stricken woman, she tries to hide her blasted face and cries: “The curse of Heaven hath stricken me because I would not call man my brother nor woman sister. I wrapped myself in pride as a mantle and scorned the sympathies of nature; and therefore has nature made this wretched body the medium of a dreadful sympathy. You are avenged, they are all avenged, nature is avenged, — for I am Eleanore Rockcliffe.” Hawthorne has had another object as well as this dramatic contrast of life and death. He has made use of a ghastly incident to point a moral, as well as to adorn his tale. Sin and its punishment — that is the real motive for writing this story. He gives the sinner youth, beauty, rank, wealth, and then crushes her with a disfiguring disease that doubtless seemed to the wretched woman worse than death. We have been reading a sermon. Turning to Poe's narrative, we find ourselves in another atmosphere. No moral effect is to be found in this work of pure imagination. It is a terrible picture of Death Triumphant. The careless, idle, happy and pleasure loving are its victims. Their luxurious surroundings only emphasize their revolting surrender. The tale is brief; there are no moral digressions, there are no historical references, there is not an unnecessary phrase. The description of the plague, the detail of the rooms, the appearance of the unwelcome guest, the pursuit, [column 2:] the horrible discovery, the consequent death and desolation, — all are stated in clear-cut, symmetrical sentences built up as one would lay the bricks of a mortuary vault. The language is the vocabulary of horror. “The Red Death had long devastated the country.” Thus it begins in ominous words, and continues: “No pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal, the redness and the horror of blood.” The end rivals the beginning. “And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

As a picture this is an extraordinary work of.art. It is the more impressive because the artist makes his appeal to but one emotion. — that of horror. With great restraint he has excluded much that might well have been admitted, — for instance, a description of the country, the names of distinguished guests, the romance of a particular couple, some detail of the life of Prince Prospero. Definite information of this character would have given an air of probability to the gruesome tale. But all this adventitious and questionable aid he rejected, as easily as he would have sneered at the suggestion that the appearance of the Red Death in the castellated abbey be made the punishment for Prince Prospero's failure to undertake sanitary works in his dominions and send district nurses among the huts of the dying peasantry. The result of this concentration, however, is the greater work of art. “In his limitations the master shows himself,” says Goethe. Hawthorne's story we should forget in time. [page 695:]

I suppose that has been our experience. We have read both of these stories in our youth and it ts the one by Poe we remember in later years. It is more finished in its form, more poetic in its vocabulary, more impressive in its gloom, and remains fixed in memory like the sculptured head of Medusa.

This moral difference that separates the work of these two gifted men is profound. It is seen in their writings generally. The New Englander spoke as from a pulpit. Few indeed are the tales in which he did not wrap up some moral for his reading public. Poe, on the other hand, appears as the man of pure intellect. For his literary conscience, moral considerations apparently did not exist. He sets out to depict a character or a scene and his one thought is to fix our attention in such a manner that we shall never forget it. A part of his success is doubtless due to the horrible, sometimes revolting, subject he chose; but a larger part is due to this severity of description that suffered the entrance of no extraneous matter. In his critical writings he announced a theory, as new then as familiar to-day — ”art for art's sake.” We may say he was the precursor of the present day conteur. Like Daudet, Gautier, Coppee, Bourget and De Maupassant, he believed that the artistry of the workmanship was far more important than the subject matter. From psychological reasons, we must believe, he chose his characters most often from the ranks of those Nordau would call degenerates, men of diseased imagination and morbid feelings, slaves of passion, often criminals, and all haunted by unescapable fear. They are so many pathological experiments.

For a mature mind they form one [column 2:] of the most remarkable and suggestive series of studies to be found in the literature of any country. These types of abnormal character, which we suspect, and not without reason, to be the secret emotions of their creator, are objectified, given a local habitation in Roderick Usher, William Wilson and the gloomy heroes of The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, berenice, Ligeia, and many another analysis of morbid suffering. These victims of crime and terror and nemesis are exposed and dissected in a purely intellectual manner, and with something of that unemotional, scientific skill with which the surgeon does his work. It is a tremendous power he exerts. In this particular field he may be said still to lead, although such tales as Kipling's The Mark of the Beast and At the End of the Passage make the latter a close second in this pursuit of the gruesome.

To turn from these morbid sketches to such a collection of short stories as are found in Twice Told Tales or Mosses From an Old Manse gives the reader a little of the impression that he has entered the realm of Sunday school literature. Among American writers of the first rank, Hawthorne is the moralist jar excellence. How many of the early tales frankly express this purpose! Egotism or the Bosom Serpent, The Artist of the Beautiful, The Great Stone Face, The Snow Image! These are typical; they are allegories pure and simple, written with that felicity of phrase of which Hawthorne was master from his first volume, beautiful as they reflect the lights of a delicate fancy, many of them works of rare imaginative power, but avowedly put forth for their moral instruction. Nor need it surprise us that in a community [page 696:] still treasuring its Puritan traditions, the young Hawthorne should have found his keen insight, his poetic fancy, his imaginative reach, his quiet humor, most often, if not always, playing about moral problems. It seems as if he wished to propitiate those Puritan ancestors, to whose scorn for the story writer he alludes in the preface to The Scarlet Letter, by the ethical content of his fanciful sketches. It was the great day of “the New England Conscience” when he wrote. One is reminded of those early Italian artists, who, rejoicing in their newfound power of expression, found it wise to conciliate the Church by scenes taken from sacred history. Certainly that is a natural explanation of the fact that Hawthorne, with imaginative gifts equal to those of Poe and a similar tendency to the morbid, should have been so largely influenced by moral considerations, while his southern compeer shows only esthetic imfluences.

It must be added that the former did not always wrap up a moral in fantastic garb to offer his New England constituency. There are a few tales, The Birthmark, Rappacini's Daughter, A Virtuoso's Collection, in Poe's own style; and on Poe's own ground the New Englander is at a disadvantage. Who remembers Rappacini's Daughter? There are other sketches, such as The Celestial Railroad, Main Street, The Town Pump, that are simply charming essays, delicious little vignettes of provincial life, after the fashion set by Addison, Lamb and Irving. These, however, are the exception. The primary and the permanent instinct was for the wholesome lesson, barely disguised, beautifully attired, with which he won and retains the affectionate interest. of the great [column 2:] reading public. As the southern writer excelled in the pure artistry of workmanship, so the northerner excelled in the happy power of presenting the familiar truths of experience in the richly decorated garb of fantasy and imagination.

This distinction applies equally to: the four novels with which Hawthorne's fame is indissolubly bound. They are not merely studies of eccentric or morbid characters, but are primarily concerned with moral or religious problems. There is but one long story by Poe with which a comparison can be made, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym. In these stories the characteristics of each writer appear. The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym is the record of the shipwreck of a stowaway. It is a series of startling adventures, of ghastly experiences, of strange discoveries in Southern seas, all told in a realistic manner that leaves an ineffaceable impression. But for that very reason it fails as a work of art. Of the same style as his tales, wrought with his strict limitation of interests, with his heroic concentration of thought, its very length is fatal. The emotion he arouses cannot be prolonged beyond a certain limit. It is a psychological impossibility. There is the inevitable reaction. The novel-reader, like the victim of disease, becomes innured to chronic suffering; he may even be cheerful. Poe wishes to produce an impression of unmitigated horror when he sets his anemic heroes in their desperate situation. In the short story his success is extraordinary. In the one long story he has written with a similar purpose and with similar method, he has failed, and inevitably failed. That intensity of emotion after which he aimed is, happily for the lover of [page 697:] fiction as well as for the victim of disease, too short-lived. Nature herself has set a limit.

Of the four great novels by Hawthorne, three have a tragic character — The Scarlet Letter, The Marble Faun, and The Blithedale Romance. In the last one the dramatic conflict is between Culture and Reform, as represented by the mysterious, gifted, fascinating Zenobia, and the hard-handed, harder-hearted blacksmith-reformer, Hollingsworth. The tragedy ends in the ghastly death of the woman and the moral wreck of the man. An even darker picture is painted in The Scarlet Letter, the precursor of some modern theological novels. Was there ever, we ask ourselves, a more subtle, a more exquisite, a more suggestive portrayal of Nemesis tracking a clerical sinner! The same theme, self-knowledge through crime and moral expiation, is given an Old-World setting in The Marble Faun.

Murder and adultery, it would appear, are the favorite sins of Fiction. Yet these common properties of the novelist are seen in a new light as Hawthorne's imagination plays about their wretched victims. We do not condemn them, we feel an immeasurable pity for them. Like Milton's Satan, they cannot escape from their guilty selves, “Which way I turn is hell. Myself am hell!”

How terrible is this transformation of the thoughtless, happy Tuscan youth into weary and perplexed manhood through the commission of an impulsive crime! Hester Prynne's open ignominy seems far more tolerable than the hidden brand of her reverend lover. How vulgar and inadequate seems the justice of a criminal court in comparison with all this suffering of the inner life, whether in New England [column 2:] or Italy! These are moral diagnoses. Miriam, Donatello, Hester, Arthur Dimmesdale, — they all have sinned, they have broken the laws of God and man; conscience-stricken they desire and yet dread to expiate their sin. Hawthorne painted this spiritual struggle with a marvellous skill. It was the awakened and imperious conscience that fascinated him.

The neurotic heroes of The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart have also violated the laws of God and man, but their agony is merely the brute fear of detection and punishment. Poe's sole interest is in depicting that agony. No moral consideration enters into their suffering, any more than in those of the victim of the inquisition in The Pit and the Pendulum. We may say that all his characters are unmoral, whether they are murderers, insane persons, clever detectives or merely “peculiar”; they do not stand in any ethical relations. They have no conscience. To atone for this lack they are given an over-elaborated nervous system. Poe might as well have shown us the sufferings of animals, except that the vivisection of human beings is more appalling.

As Hawthorne never forgot that deepest of all conflicts, the tragedy of the inner life, his characters have a reality those of his rival do not possess. In the tales of the latter it is the situation that compels our attention, while in those of the former it is the personality that fascinates. However dramatic the situation may be, still the man or woman dominates it so greatly that we turn from the brilliant setting of the scene to the characters. That is, our interest in the chapter when Miriam and Donatello, after the murder of her insane persecutor, [page 698:] wander through the blood-stained streets of historic Rome and answer to that tacit claim of kinship with all their known and unknown predecessors in crime. It is the inner agony and the momentary feeling of expiation of Dimmesdale that holds us in that wonderful picture of the midnight vigil on the scaffold, when the weak man, leaning for support upon Hester, holding fast by the hand of the child of their love, sees in the blazing heaven a vast scarlet letter, symbol of their sin and their suffering. It is the personality, and particularly the. moral personality, that engaged Hawthorne's powers. The environment, whether in Rome or Boston, was a minor consideration. He might well have said with Browning — ”the incidents in the development of a soul, little else is worth study.”

This is seen also in The House of Seven Gables, where we have the smiles of comedy instead of the tears of tragedy. The crime was in the past; it is the after effects, the blighting influence of ancient wrong brought down to a later time that attracted Hawthorne. Poor homely old Hepzibah! Poor injured, bewildered Clifford! Eccentric figures, quaint, angular, “peculiar” as they say in New England, how pathetic they.are! It is a study of provincial life, with crime in the background and personal idiosyncrasy the forefront, — a study of heredity and ill-balanced character set off by the contrast of the love romance of two pleasing, but prosaic young people, and varied by charming little pictures of village life. But the moral lesson is as evident in this comedy as in the tragedy of the other romances. The death of Judge Pyncheon is the ripe occasion for some [column 2:] vigorous preaching as well as some necessary explanations.

“It is very singular how the fact of a man's death often seems to give people a truer idea of his character, whether for good or evil, than they have ever possessed while he was living and acting among them Death is so genuine a fact that it excludes falsehood or betrays its emptiness; it is a touchstone that proves the gold and dishonors the baser metal.”

Such moralizing as this meets us continually in these tales and novels. His Puritan inheritance and environment gave Hawthorne his power, but they were also, certainly at times, an injury to him. They interfered with the artistry of his work. So intent was he upon impressing his homily that his last word was not infrequently an anticlimax. After we have followed Dimmesdales expiation§ through some three hundred pages of subtle and painful analysis, it is surely unnecessary for us to be told: “Among many morals which press upon us from the poor sinner's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: Be true! be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred.” After reading this, we are thankful for the “only.” For this relief, much thanks! The moralist knocks the artist down and trainples upon him.

The same offence is repeated the close of The Blithedale Romance. The tragic death of the gifted Zenobia, made more horrible by the brutal comment of the prosaic farmer and the esthetic reflection of the speculative Coverdale, as the body of the suicide is taken from the water and the men try to straighten the limbs,rigid in the attitude of prayer, brings impressively home tous the danger of moral fanaticism. \WVhat can possibly be gained [page 699:] by adding to this convincing scene an explanatory card for the New England conscience! ‘The moral which presents itself to my reflection,” he begins; and closes, “I see in Hollingsworth an exemplification of the most awful truth in Bunyan's book of such; from the very gate of heaven there is a by-way to the pit.”

The highest art teaches by suggestion. When the writer has expressed his thought clearly, further explanation only weakens it. If a picture conveys its truth, why append a description? Hawthorne's last chapter was apt to be an anticlimax. Who cares for Miles Coverdale's confession that he loves Priscilla! The blithedale Romance really ends with Coverdale's visit to the unhappy Hollingsworth and his mournful reflection over the death of the brilliant Zenobia. In The Marble Faun it is not the lovemaking of Hilda and Kenyon we want to see fulfilled — in marriage: that we can easily infer in the unwritten sequel. ‘ITlms tragic story should end in the carnival scene when Hilda throws the white rose at her lover, while the gay revellers in the Corso whisper of the arrest of Miriam and Donatello, those mysterious figures of the contadina and peasant in their midst. In fact, I do not see the need of Kenyon in this story — except that four persons are a convenient number for a European party; for with Hawthorne's fondness for symbolism, Hilda represents light and Miriam darkness, while the Tuscan youth (innocence and animal joy) through the darkness of passion comes to find his soul. The story, a moral drama, is the change of this blithesome creature into a conscience — awakened and conscience-stricken man, revolting [column 2:] from the woman for whose sake he had committed the crime that had finally united them.

Even in that delightful House of Seven Gables, it would have been better if the tale had ended with the return to the house of their forbears, of the aged and fantastic old couple, after that remarkable railway journey, “for pleasure merely,” as Clifford blandly told the conductor, where Youth and Joy, in the persons of Holgrave and Phoebe, were anxiously listening for the footsteps of the wanderers. Hawthorne's marriages, like his morals, are too showy, they are almost vulgar. At times, we seem to be reading the pages of a society journal.

I do not mean to say that tragedy should not be relieved by occasional comedy. In Hamlet we are permitted to smile over the ghastly jesting of the grave-diggers, and in Macbeth over the blasphemous humor of the drunken porter. But Shakespeare was too much the artist to end a tragic tale with the hackneyed words “they were married and lived happily ever afterward.”

It was a blunder Poe never made. In his sombre pictures hero and heroine always wore the tragic mask and buskin. ‘they did not look to have “honor, love, obedience, troops of friends.” They have no future, as they had no past. For one moment, the supreme moment, we see them in the grasp of bitter circumstance, wretched, despairing creatures, victims of their fierce passion, caught in the toils of their own weaving. But the hideous, at times revolting picture is a masterpiece, one of the immortal canvasses of literature.

Of a piece with this ubiquitous and oppressive morality in the Tales [page 700:] of Hawthorne is that familiar incident in The Marble Faun where Miriam the cultivated woman, the connoisseur (?) of art, declaims against the nude in painting and statue. It is, of course, Hawthorne who speaks and very indignantly, suggesting the deacon's wife or the rustic youth in the picture gallery. Such lapses, more frequent than we would wish, help us to understand Mr. Henry James’ final estimate of the New England novelist as “exquisitely provincial.” If the adjective offends Hawthorne's admirers, the adverb may reconcile them. This leads to the thought that the prurient never appealed to either Poe or Hawthorne. This is more surprising in the case of the former than of the latter, for he always depicted romantic, passionate love. In some respects he reminds us of De Maupassant, who also loved to study the abnormal, the morbid, the grotesque, but who, unlike his predecessor and perhaps teacher, was apt to show his heroines after they had undressed for the night. Poe's unhappy lovers are always decently clothed, if not in their right mind. This marked difference between French and American romance may be due to our national character or to the earlier period when Poe wrote, or to an innate delicacy of mind. Doubtless all these reasons must be taken into consideration. Passionately fond of beauty as Poe was, loving it in rich decoration as well as in female charms, apparently his zsthetic lover never gloated over the personal attractions of his mistress. It is not easy to imagine Hawthorne as ever under the slightest temptation to unclean representation. It is, on the other hand, a little surprising to note that Poe, writing without any moral [column 2:] intention, delighting in beauty, portraying unrequited passion, was never led into prurient description. Leonore, Helen and Annabel are as chaste as the Venus of Milo. In his respect for woman he is as marked as his northern rival.

Another comment we make is that each cared more for his hero than for his heroine. It was a masculine interest that appealed to them. Their power of keen analysis and delicate imagination played around the fate of some tempted and tortured man.

With a moral to be rolled and fiction-coated for his readers, Hawthorne could not easily surrender himself to pure fancy. His sombre imagination, so intent upon the tragic aspects of character, naturally made much use of an historical background. Salem, Boston and Rome were not simply the residence of his personages, they had to reside somewhere we admit, but they were significant as a background; the local traditions affected the characters. And we know that no small part of his charm is in this influence of tradition, and in the vivid description of historic spots and far-away times. Most of all, he affected New England life and that earlier day of Puritan and Quaker, of witch and colonial governor. The descriptions of Roman art and architecture have been better done by many a less gifted writer. It is in the Puritan setting of The Scarlet Letter and many of the early Tales where his genius is most at home, for he is more convincing in those scenes where his own Puritan inheritance gave him an insight into that stern, joyless age from which his reason indeed revolted, but which his sympathy could recreate. The Gentle Boy, The Gray Champion, The Mininster's [page 701:] Black Veil, The Legends of the Province House, — such tales are representative. He wished to tread upon historic ground even while his imagination brought all manner of mysterious and subtle influences to bear upon his characters. He dwelt in the border land of history and fancy, where the natural and the supernatural are easily confused. Did the Faun have pointed ears? We shall never know. Did the ministet really show a scarlet letter on his breast? We are purposely left in doubt. These are imaginative features in the tale of sin and expiation, those transfiguring touches upon a conventional theme that indicate the great artist.

When we turn to the tales by Poe, we observe that his fancy has a free flight, it scorns the prosaic earth. As he has no moral to inculcate, except in the rarest instances, as in William Wilson, only intellectual and esthetic considerations counted. He sought to give the reader a dramatic, overpowering impression — usually one of horror, and he succeeded so well that we often seem to be in the agony of a nightmare. As his sole interest was in certain dark states of the soul, his background was simply a room, more or less richly furnished. He usually found his terror-stricken heroes in Europe, but this is only because it is the land of castellated abbeys, old families, ebony clocks and choice wines, — the scenic properties of his stage. He never betrays that historic sense which meets us constantly in the fiction of Hawthorne. His characters might have lived anywhere; those of the latter could only have lived where they did. His scenes are in the inner world of a diseased, introspective, appalled [column 2:] imagination. This accounts for his restraint in narration.

Hawthorne was fond of the leisurely, digressive, illustrative, anecdotal fashion of story-telling. Even in the early tales, as — Lady Eleanore's Mantle, he continually wanders from the path of narration to gather the flowers of fancy and reflection; while in the four great novels we do not know whether we find more enjoyment in the central plot or in these literary digressions. When Donatello visits Miriam's studio he finds her engaged in the feminine task of mending a pair of gloves. That is a characteristic touch of Hawthorne. The mystic and symbolical are brought into intimate union with the simple and commonplace. We want to know if the ears of Miriam's boyish lover are pointed like those of the faun he resembles, and when we are hoping she will push back his curls and satisfy our curiosity we have a little essay upon the “very sweet, soft and winning effect in this peculiarity of needlework, distinguishing women from men.” Personally, I cannot confess to any interest in needlework; but this is only one of innumerable digressions from which, as in a modern bazaar, we can take our choice. For the fact is that we do enjoy these little essays, whatever may be their subject, quite as much as the pictures of places and the frequent historical reference. They all have their charm, and as Hawthorne's plots are speedily resolved, or unimportant, we are in no haste to get to the end of the narrative. His method is that of the musician whose principal theme is very soon followed by subsidiary themes and the working out of them all in a rich and involved orchestration. One should read Hawthorne as one takes [page 702:] a vacation trip to Europe — in no hurry to reach the journey's end, enjoying the novel scenes, the varied experiences, the special pleasure each day may bring the traveller. It is all delightful reading in Hawthorne — I forget myself! except the morals and the marriages and the needlework.

With Poe, there is no delay. We have taken the fast mail for Mme. Tussaud's chamber of horrors. Nothing distracts our attention, and the result is one overwhelming impression. We listen as if held by the glittering eye of the ancient mariner while he tells his sinister tale. As an illustration take The AsSignation, one of those singularly beautiful tales of the inconsolable lover — a favorite theme. In one respect we may compare it with The Marble Faun. Each gave the opportunity for incidental description of a world-famous city. We know what use Hawthorne made of Rome as a background for his tragedy, and we take a solid pleasure in the picturesque descriptions of Colosseum, galleries, palaces, fountains and historic streets.

Poe's tale is laid in Venice, but he resists the temptation to wander through the palaces of that city by the sea, under the Paradise of Tintoretto, past the equestrian statue of Colleon I., and concentrates our interest upon the reunion at daybreak, through the poisoned cup, of the separated and unhappy lovers.

Or let us take The Fall of the House of Usher and The House of Seven Gables. In these two imaginative works we have, perhaps, the perfect flower of each writer's art; certainly the artistry is as beautiful and characteristic as anything they have to show. Each is the picture of a ruined home, of a falling family. [column 2:] Neither story, we perceive, could have been written by the other. Poe's tale is brief. Opening with a minor chord, each sentence leads up to the final crash of sound when lightning smites the gloomy castle and the insane Roderick Usher and ‘the resuscitated body of his twin sister are buried amid the falling stones. It is a noble piece of workmanship. Mr. Lowell praised “its serene and sombre beauty.” Its extraordinary power may be explained by its brevity, its concentration of interest, its poetic vocabulary, its appeal to one emotion, — that of horror. Expanded into a volume the length of Hawthorne's story, it would only repeat the failure of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym.

In the romance of The House of Seven Gables the melancholy impressions of the decaying family of Pyncheon, prolonged through so many chapters, is lightened up by quiet humor, by innumerable little descriptions of village life, and by the varied dialogue of half a dozen contrasted characters. We perceive that it would have been as great a blunder to try to condense such a picture of provincial life in New England into the compass of the short story as to prolong the darkening horror of Poe's tale. Each is admirable as a work of art, the one as a romance, the other as a tale.

There is another aspect of Poe's work, one which finds no parallel in the writings of Hawthorne. The detective stories are as unique and perfect in their way as the more familiar tales. His intellect delighted in its own ingenuity. Those who have once made the acquaintance of M. Auguste Dupin, most clever of logicians, will not soon forget him. The Purloined Letter has a long-lived interest. A very high Personage, — [page 703:]

Poe — is fond of personages, — with a capital P. — has had a love letter stolen by a minister of state who holds the exalted personage in his power as long as he retains the letter. Of course the secret police search the rooms of the thief, they even waylay and search him; but all in vain. Then Dupin, the amateur detective, enters upon the stage and finds the missing paper in a conspicuous place in the minister's cabinet — the result of very acute reasoning. The scene is laid in Paris, but that is only to give us the exalted Personage. It might as well, except for the more luxurious surroundings, have been laid in Baltimore or Boston. The two murder stories are also set in Paris, but there is no more historical than moral interest in them. They are merely a labyrinthine maze of crime which Dupin easily penetrates and whence he returns, leading the criminal by the hand. In all the other similar tales, The Balloon Hoax, The Adventure of one Hans Pfall, and The Gold Bug, we remark that clever, ingenious display of logical power. We can easily believe the anecdote, authenticated as it is, that from the opening chapters of Barnaby Rudge, as they appeared in serial form, Poe announced the logical and, as it proved, correct denouement.

The prose of Poe easily passes [column 2:] over into verse. The Island of the Fay, The Domain of Arnheim, Silence, Shadow, — these are in fact prose poems. Therein, his work takes on another color from any we find in the writings of Hawthorne who was ever the prose writer; an exquisite, beautiful, artistic use of words he had indeed, but yet separated by the vocabulary as well as form from all claim to the rhythmic line. Of the verse of Poe it is not the intention of this sketch to speak, although the reader is inevitably led up to it. The Raven, hackneyed as it has become, may well sum up for us the highest reach of his genius, the climax of his imaginative work. Here we have the familiar theme — the inconsolable lover, all the richness of decoration of which Poe was so fond, and that deep-seated melancholy we associate with him, all set over against a sympathetic background of night and mystery. There are more beautiful things in his verse, but on the whole nothing that is so characteristic of his spirit and his art: and this applies equally to his verse and his prose. In our final estimate we would call Poe the poet and Hawthorne the moralist, each an honored name in American letters and a source of permanent enjoyment for all who delight in great literary art.