The public for whom Poe wrote, though grossly unappreciative of his
art, was by no means unaccustomed to the horrors with which he dealt.
America, besides inheriting the usual dark folklore of Europe, had an
additional fund of weird associations to draw upon; so that spectral
legends had already been recognized as fruitful subject-matter for
literature. Charles Brockden Brown had achieved phenomenal fame with
his Radcliffian romances, and Washington Irving's lighter treatment
of eerie themes had quickly become classic. This additional fund
proceeded, as Paul Elmer Moore has pointed out, from the keen spiritual
and theological interests of the first colonists, plus the strange
and forbidding nature of the scene into which they were plunged, the
vast and gloomy virgin forest in whose perpetual twilight all terrors
might well lurk; the hordes of coppery Indians whose strange, saturnine
visages and violent customs hinted strongly at traces of infernal
origin; the free rein given under the influence of Puritan theocracy
to all manner of notions respecting man's relation to the stern and
vengeful God of the Calvinists, and to the sulphureous Adversary of
that God, about whom so much was thundered in the pulpits each Sunday;
and the morbid introspection developed by an isolated backwoods life
devoid of normal amusements and of the recreational mood, harassed
by commands for theological self-examination, keyed to unnatural
emotional repression, and forming above all a mere grim struggle for
survival--all these things conspired to produce an environment in
which the black whisperings of sinister grandams were heard far beyond
the chimney corner, and in which tales of witchcraft and unbelievable
secret monstrosities lingered long after the dread days of the Salem
nightmare.
Poe represents the newer, more disillusioned, and more technically
finished of the weird schools that rose out of this propitious milieu.
Another school--the tradition of moral values, gentle restraint, and
mild, leisurely phantasy tinged more or less with the whimsical--was
represented by another famous, misunderstood, and lonely figure in
American letters--the shy and sensitive Nathaniel Hawthorne, scion
of antique Salem and great-grandson of one of the bloodiest of the
old witchcraft judges. In Hawthorne we have none of the violence, the
daring, the high colouring, the intense dramatic sense, the cosmic
malignity, and the undivided and impersonal artistry of Poe. Here,
instead, is a gentle soul cramped by the Puritanism of early New
England; shadowed and wistful, and grieved at an unmoral universe
which everywhere transcends the conventional patterns thought by our
forefathers to represent divine and immutable law. Evil, a very real
force to Hawthorne, appears on every hand as a lurking and conquering
adversary; and the visible world becomes in his fancy a theater of
infinite tragedy and woe, with unseen, half-existent influences
hovering over it and through it, battling for supremacy and moulding
the destinies of the hapless mortals who form its vain and self-deluded
population. The heritage of American weirdness was his to a most
intense degree, and he saw a dismal throng of vague spectres behind the
common phenomena of life; but he was not disinterested enough to value
impressions, sensations, and beauties of narration for their own sake.
He must needs weave his phantasy into some quietly melancholy fabric
of didactic or allegorical cast, in which his meekly resigned cynicism
may display with naive moral appraisal the perfidy of a human race
which he cannot cease to cherish and mourn despite his insight into
its hypocrisy. Supernatural horror, then, is never a primary object
with Hawthorne; though its impulses were so deeply woven into his
personality that he cannot help suggesting it with the force of genius
when he calls upon the unreal world to illustrate the pensive sermon he
wishes to preach.
Hawthorne's intimations of the weird, always gentle, elusive, and
restrained, may be traced throughout his work. The mood that produced
them found one delightful vent in the Teutonised retelling of classic
myths for children contained in "A Wonder Book" and "Tanglewood
Tales," and at other times exercised itself in casting a certain
strangeness and intangible witchery or malevolence over events not
meant to be actually supernatural; as in the macabre posthumous novel
"Dr. Grimshawe's Secret," which invests with a peculiar sort of
repulsion a house existing to this day in Salem, and abutting on the
ancient Charter Street Ground. In "The Marble Faun," whose design was
sketched out in an Italian villa reputed to be haunted, a tremendous
background of genuine phantasy and mystery palpitates just beyond
the common reader's sight; and glimpses of fabulous blood in mortal
veins are hinted at during the course of a romance which cannot help
being interesting despite the persistent incubus of moral allegory,
anti-Popery propaganda, and a Puritan prudery which caused the late
D. H. Lawrence to express a longing to treat the author in a highly
undignified manner. "Septimius Felton," a posthumous novel whose idea
was to have been elaborated and incorporated into the unfinished
"Dolliver Romance," touches on the Elixir of Life in a more or less
capable fashion; whilst the notes for a never-written tale to be called
"The Ancestral Footstep," shows what Hawthorne would have done with an
intensive treatment of an old English superstition--that of an ancient
and accursed line whose members left footprints of blood as they
walked--which appears incidentally in both "Septimius Felton" and "Dr.
Grimshawe's Secret."
(Mr. Lovecraft tells you more about Nathaniel Hawthorne in the next
issue. Don't miss Part Seventeen).
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