greater strength of Irving's humor,--a trait, always much lauded in him.
It is without doubt a good quality. This mild, sweet radiance of an
uncontaminated and well-bred spirit is not a common thing in literature.
But I cannot fall in with the judgment that calls it "freer and far more
joyous" than Addison's. Both in style and in humor Irving has caught
something of the grace of "The Spectator"; but as in the style he
frequently falls short, writing feeble or jarring sentences, so in humor
I cannot see how he is to be brought at all on a level with Addison, who
is primarily a grave, stately, scholarly mind, but all the deeper on
that account in the lustre of his humorous displays. Addison, too, had
somewhat of the poet in him, and was capable of tragedy as well as of
neat satire and compact characterization. But if we looked for a pithy
embodiment of the difference between Irving and Hawthorne, we might call
the former a "polite writer," and the latter a profound poet: as,
indeed, I have called him in this essay, though with no intent to
confuse the term with that given to poets who speak in verse. Pathos is
the great touchstone of humor, and Irving's pathos is always a
lamentable failure. Is it not very significant, that he should have made
so little of the story of Rip Van Winkle? In his sketch, which has won
so wide a fame and given a lasting association to the Kaatskills, there
is not a suspicion of the immense pathos which the skill of an
industrious playwright and the genius of that rare actor, Mr. Jefferson,
have since developed from the tale. The Dame Van Winkle that we now know
is the creation of Mr. Boucicault; to him it is we owe that vigorous
character,--a scold, a tyrant to her husband, but nevertheless full of
relentful womanliness, and by the justice of her cause exciting our
sympathy almost as much as Rip himself does. In the story, she wears an
aspect of singular causelessness, and Rip's devotion to the drinking-can
is barely hinted: the marvellous tenderness, too, and joyful sorrow of
his return after the twenty years' sleep, are apparently not even
suspected by the writer. It is the simple wonder and picturesqueness of
the situation that charm him; and while in the drama we are moved to the
bottom of our hearts by the humorous tragicalness it casts over the
spectacle of conflicting passions, the only outcome of the written tale
is a passing reflection on the woe of being henpecked. "And it is a
common wish of all henpecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life
hangs heavy on their hands, that they might have a quieting draught out
of Rip Van Winkle's flagon." To be sure, there is a hidden moral here,
of the folly of driving men to drunkenness; but it is so much obscured
as to suggest that this was of small moment in the writer's mind. Such a
moral, in any case, must necessarily have been very delicately advanced,
in order not to becloud the artistic atmosphere; but a person of
searching dramatic genius would have found means to emphasize it without
injury to art, just as it has been done on the stage. Imagine what
divine vibrations of emotion Hawthorne would have smitten out of this
theme, had he been the originator of it. Certainly we should, as the
case stands, have missed the whole immortal figment, had not Irving
given it to us in germ; the fact that our playwright and our master
comedian have made it so much greater and more beautiful does not annul
that primary service; but, looking at the matter historically, we must
admit that Irving's share in the credit is that of the first projector
of a scientific improvement, and the latter sort of person always has to
forego a great part of his fame in favor of the one who consummates the
discovery. I am willing to believe that there was a peculiar advantage
in Irving's treatment; namely, that he secured for his story a quicker
and more general acceptance than might have been granted to something
more profound; but this does not alter the critical judgment that we
have to pass upon it. If Irving had grasped the tragic sphere at all, he
would have shone more splendidly in the comic. But the literary part of
him, at least, never passed into the shade: it somehow contrived to be
always on that side of the earth which was towards the sun. Observe,
now, the vital office of humor in Hawthorne's thought. It gleams out
upon us from behind many of the gravest of his conceptions, like the
silver side of a dark leaf turning in the wind. Wherever the concretion
of guilt is most adamantine, there he lets his fine slender jet of humor
play like a lambent fire, until the dark mass crumbles, and the choragos
of the tragedy begins his mournful yet hopeful chant among the ruins.
This may be verified in the "Seven Gables," "Blithedale," and "The
Marble Faun"; not in "The Scarlet Letter," for that does not present
Hawthorne's genius in its widest action. In one place he speaks of "the
tragic power of laughter,"--a discrimination which involves the whole
deep originality of his mind. It is not irrelevant here to remark that
at the most affecting portions of the play "Rip Van Winkle," the
majority of the audience always laugh; this, though irritating to a
thoughtful listener, is really an involuntary tribute to the marvellous
wisdom and perfection with which Jefferson mingles pathos and humor.
Again Hawthorne: "Human destinies look _ominous_ without some
perceptible intermixture of the sable or the gray." And, elsewhere:
"There is _something more awful in happiness than in sorrow_, the
latter being earthly and finite, the former composed of the substance
and texture of eternity, so that spirits still embodied may well tremble
at it." These thoughts could never have occurred to Irving with the same
intensity. Now, from all this we gather inference as to the deep sources
of Hawthorne's humor. I sometimes think that Thalia was the daughter,
and not the sister, of Melpomene. As to actual exhibition of humor,
Hawthorne's is made a diffusive medium to temper the rays of tragedy
with, and never appears in such unmixed form as that of Irving. So that
even though we must confess a smaller mental calibre in the latter, we
may gladly grant him a superiority in his special mood of fun.
An excellent English critic, Leslie Stephen, lately wrote: "Poe is a
kind of Hawthorne and _delirium tremens_." This announcement,
however, betrays a singular misapprehension. When Hawthorne's tales
first appeared, they were almost invariably taken to bear an intimate
and direct relation to the author's own moods; while Poe's were supposed
to be daring flights of pure imagination, or ingenious attempts to prove
theories held by the writer, but were not charged directly to his own
experience. Time has shown that the converse was the case. The psychical
conditions described by Hawthorne had only the remotest connection with
any mood of his own; they were mainly translations, into the language of
genius, of certain impressions and observations drawn from the world
around him. After his death, the Note-Books caused a general rustle of
surprise, revealing as they did the simple, wholesome nature of this
strange imaginer; yet though he there speaks--surely without prejudice,
because without the least knowledge that the world would ever hear
him--of "the objectivity" of his fictions, critics have not yet wholly
learned how far apart from himself these creations were. The observation
of some mental habit in men, or law of intercourse between human beings,
would strongly present itself to him; and in order to get a concise
embodiment, his genius planned some powerful situation to illustrate it
with; or, at another time it might be that a strange incident, like that
of Mr. Moody, suggesting "The Minister's Black Veil," or a singular
physiological fact like that on which "The Bosom Serpent" is based,
would call out his imagination to run a race with reality and outstrip
it in touching the goal of truth. But, the conception once formed, the
whole fictitious fabric would become entirely removed from
_himself_, except so far as it touched him very incidentally; and
this expulsion of the idea from himself, so that it acquires a life and
movement of its own, and can be contemplated by the artist from the
outside, is the very distinction between deeply creative and merely
inventive genius. Poe's was of the latter sort. He possessed a wild,
arbitrary imagination, that sometimes leaped frantically high; but his
impressiveness is always that of a nightmare, always completely morbid.
What we know of Poe's life leads inevitably to the conclusion that this
quality, if it did not spring from disease, was at least largely owing
to it. For a time, it was the fashion to make a moral question of Poe's
unfortunate obliquities; but a more humane tendency reduces it to a
scientific problem. Poe suffered great disaster at the hands of his
unjust biographer; yet he was a worse enemy to himself than any one else
could be. The fine enamel of his genius is all corroded by the deadly
acid of his passions. The imperfections of his temperament have pierced
his poetry and prose, shattered their structure, and blurred their
beauty. Only four or five of his poems--"The Raven," "Ligeia," the
earlier of the two addressed "To Helen," and the sonnet to his
wife--escape being flawed by some fit of haste, some ungovernable error
of taste, some hopeless, unaccountable break in their beauty. In
criticism, Poe initiated a fearless and agile movement; he had an acute
instinct in questions of literary form, amounting to a passion, as all
his instincts and perceptions did; he had also the knack of finding
clever reasons, good or bad, for all his opinions. These things are
essential to a critic's equipment, and it was good service in Poe to
exemplify them. Yet here, too, the undermining processes of his
thoroughly unsound mind subverted the better qualities, vitiated his
judgments with incredible jealousies and conflicting impulses, and
withered the most that he wrote in this direction into something very
like rubbish. We have seen, for example, how his attempt to
dispassionately examine Hawthorne resulted. Sooner or later, too, he ran
his own pen full against his rigid criteria for others. It is suggestive
to find that the holder of such exacting doctrine about beauty, the man
also of whom pre-eminently it may be said, as Baudelaire wrote of him,
"Chance and the incomprehensible were his two great enemies," should so
completely fail to reach even the unmoral perfection which he assigned
as the highest attainable. Professing himself the special apostle of the
beautiful in art, he nevertheless forces upon us continually the most
loathsome hideousness and the most debasing and unbeautiful horror. This
passionate, unhelmed, errant search for beauty was in fact not so much a
normal and intelligent desire, as an attempt to escape from interior
discord; and it was the discord which found expression, accordingly,
instead of the sense of beauty,--except (as has been said) in fragments.
Whatever the cause, his brain had a rift of ruin in it, from the start,
and though his delicate touch often stole a new grace from classic
antiquity, it was the frangibility, the quick decay, the fall of all
lovely and noble things, that excited and engaged him. "I have imbibed
the shadows of fallen columns," he says in one of his tales, "at Balbec,
and Tadmor, and Persepolis, until my very soul has become a ruin."
Always beauty and grace are with him most poetic in their overthrow, and
it is the shadow of ruined grandeur that he receives, instead of the
still living light so fair upon them, or the green growth clinging
around them. Hawthorne, too, wandered much amid human ruin, but it was
not with delight in the mere fact of decay; rather with grieving over
it, and the hope to learn how much of life was still left in the wreck,
and how future structures might be made stronger by studying the sources
of failure. One of the least thoughtful remarks which I have heard
touching Hawthorne was this, that his books could not live because they
dealt with the "sick side" of human nature. As if great poets ever
refrained from dealing with it! The tenure of fame depends on whether
the writer has himself become infected with sickness. With Hawthorne
this is most certainly not the case, for the morbid phases which he
studied were entirely outside of himself. Poe, on the other hand,
pictured his own half-maniacal moods and diseased fancies. There is
absolutely no study of character in his stories, no dramatic
separateness of being. He looks only for fixed and inert human
quantities, with which he may juggle at will. He did not possess
insight; and the analytic quality of which he was so proud was merely a
sort of mathematical ingenuity of calculation, in which, however, he was
extraordinarily keen. As a mere potency, dissociated from qualities, Poe
must be rated almost highest among American poets, and high among
prosaists; no one else offers so much pungency, such impetuous and
frightful energy crowded into such small compartments. Yet it would be
difficult to find a poetic fury less allied to sane human life than that
which informs his tales. It is not the _representation_ of
semi-insanity that he gives: he himself is its _representative_.
Instead of commanding it, and bringing it into some sort of healthy
relation with us, he is swayed and carried away by it. His genius
flourished upon him like a destructive flame, and the ashes that it
left, are like a deadly powdered poison. Clifford Pyncheon in the "Seven
Gables" is Poe himself, deprived of the ability to act: in both are
found the same consummate fastidiousness, the same abnormal egotism. And
it is worth attention that when Clifford is aroused to sudden action by
Judge Pyncheon's death, the coruscating play of his intellect is almost
precisely that brilliant but defective kind of ratiocination which Poe
so delights to display. It is crazy wildness, with a surface appearance
of accurate and refined logic. In this fact, that Hawthorne--the calm,
ardent, healthy master of imagination--is able to create the disordered
type that Poe _is_, we shall find by how much the former is greater
than the latter.
A recent writer has raised distinctly the medical question as to Poe. He
calls him "the mad man of letters _par excellence_," and by an
ingenious investigation seems to establish it as probable that Poe was
the victim of a form of epilepsy. But in demonstrating this, he attempts
to make it part of a theory that all men of genius are more or less
given over to this same "veiled epilepsy." And here he goes beyond the
necessities of the case, and takes up an untenable position. There is a
morbid and shattering susceptibility connected with some genius; but
that tremulous, constantly readjusted sensitiveness which indicates the
perfect equilibrium of health in other minds must not be confounded with
it. Such is the condition of the highest genius alone; of men like
Shakespere and Hawthorne, who, however dissimilar their temperaments,
grasp the two spheres of mind and character, the sane and the insane,
and hold them perfectly reconciled by their gentle yet unsparing
insight. A case like Poe's, where actual mental decay exists in so
advanced a stage and gives to his productions a sharper and more
dazzling effect than would have been theirs without it, is probably more
unique, but it is certainly less admirable, less original in the true
sense, than an instance of healthier endowment like Hawthorne. On the
side of art, it is impossible to bring Poe into any competition with
Hawthorne: although we have ranked him high in poetry and prose,
regarded simply as a dynamic substance, it must be confessed that his
prose has nothing which can be called style, nor even a manner like
Irving's very agreeable one. His feeling for form manifests itself in
various ways, yet he constantly violates proportion for the sake of
getting off one of his pseudo-philosophical disquisitions; and,
notwithstanding many successful hits in expression, and a specious but
misleading assumption of fervid accuracy in phraseology, his language is
loose, promiscuous, and altogether tiresome.
Poe, Irving, and Hawthorne have one marked literary condition in common:
each shows a double side. With Poe the antithesis is between poetry and
criticism; Irving, having been brought up by Fiction as a foster-mother,
is eventually turned over to his rightful guardian, History; and
Hawthorne rests his hand from ideal design, in elaborating quiet
pictures of reality. In each case there is more or less seeming
irreconcilement between the two phases found in combination; but the
opposition is rather more distinct in Hawthorne, and the grasp with
which it is controlled by him is stronger than that of either Poe or
Irving,--again a result pronouncing him the master.
There is still another issue on which comparison must be made. The
question of nationality will for some time to come be an interesting one
in any discussion of American authors. The American character is so
relative, that it is only by a long series of contrasts, a careful study
of the registering-plate of literature, that we shall come to the point
of defining it. American quality in literature is not like Greek,
German, French, English quality: those are each unified, and their
component elements stoutly enough welded together to make what may be
called a positive impression; but _our_ distinctions are relative.
The nearest and most important means that we have for measuring them is
that of comparison with England; and anything strikingly original in
American genius is found to be permanent in proportion as it maintains a
certain relation to English literature, not quite easy to define. It is
not one of hostility, for the best American minds thus far have had the
sincerest kindliness toward the mother country; it involves, however,
the claiming of separate standards of judgment. The primary division,
both in the case of the New England Pilgrims and in that of our
Revolutionary patriots, was based on clearer perceptions of certain
truths on the part of the cisatlantic English; and this claiming of
separate standards in literature is a continuation of that historic
attitude. We are making a perpetual minority report on the rest of the
world, sure that in time our voice will be an authoritative one. The
attitude being a relative and not very positively predicable one, a
singular integrity of judgment is required in sustaining it. Of this Poe
exhibits nothing. It was a part of the ingrained rebellion in him, that
he revolted against the moneyed mediocracy of this country,--a position
in which he deserves much sympathy,--and perhaps this underlies his want
of deep literary identification with the national character in general.
But more probably his genius was a detonating agent which could have
been convulsed into its meet activity anywhere, and had nothing to do
with a soil. It is significant that he was taken up by a group of men in
Paris, headed by Baudelaire and assisted by Théophile Gautier, as a sort
of private demigod of art; and I believe he stands in high esteem with
the Rossetti-Morris family of English poets. Irving, on the other hand,
comes directly upon the ground of difference between the American and
the English genius, but it is with the colors of a neutral. Irving's
position was peculiar. He went to Europe young, and ripened his genius
under other suns than those that imbrowned the hills of his native
Hudson. He had won success enough through "Salmagundi" and
"Knickerbocker's History" to give him the importance of an accredited
literary ambassador from the Republic, in treating with a foreign
audience; and he really did us excellent service abroad. This alone
secures him an important place in our literary history. Particularly
wise and dignified is the tone of his short chapter called "English
Writers on America"; and this sentence from it might long have served in
our days of fairer fame as a popular motto: "We have but to live on, and
every day we live a whole volume of refutation." His friendship with
Scott, also, was a delightful addition to the amenities of literature,
and shall remain a goodly and refreshing memory to us always. Yet what
he accomplished in this way for American literature at large, Irving
compensated for with some loss of his own dignity. It cannot be denied
that the success of "The Sketch-Book" led to an overdoing of his part in
"Bracebridge Hall." "Salmagundi" was the first step in the path of
palpable imitation of Addison's "Spectator"; in "The Sketch-Book,"
though taking some charming departures, the writer made a more refined
attempt to produce the same order of effects so perfectly attained by
the suave Queen Anne master; and in "Bracebridge Hall" the recollection
of the Sir Roger de Coverley papers becomes positively annoying. It is
not that the style of Addison is precisely reproduced, of course, but
the general resemblance in manner is as close as it could well have been
without direct and conscious copying, the memory of Addisonian methods
is too apparent. Irving's real genius, which occasionally in his other
writings emits delicious flashes, does not often assert itself in this
work; and though he has the knack of using the dry point of Addison's
humor, he doesn't achieve what etchers call "the burr" that ought to
result from its use. Addison, too, stings his lines in with true
aquafortis precision, and Irving's sketches are to his as pen-and-ink
drawing to the real etching. But it was not only this lack of literary
independence that belittled Irving's dignity. He had become so well
satisfied with his post of mediator between the writers of the two
nations, that it became paramount with him to preserve the good-will he
had won in England, and this appears in the cautious and _almost_
obsequious mien of "Bracebridge." One may trace it also, with amused
pain, in his correspondence with Paulding,--honest, pathetic Paulding, a
rabid miso-Briton who burned to write something truly American, and
couldn't; whom Drake laughingly hails as
"The bard of the backwoods,
The poet of cabbages, log-huts, and gin."
Irving was vexedly concerned at the violent outbreaks of his old
coadjutor, directed against the British; yet, though they were foolish,
they showed real pluck. But if we need other proof of the attitude which
Irving was distinctly recognized to have taken up, we may turn to a page
on which "The Edinburgh Review," unusually amiable toward him at first,
thus vented its tyrannical displeasure at his excessive complaisance:
"He gasped for British popularity [it said]: he came, and found it. He
was received, caressed, applauded, made giddy: natural politeness owed
him some return, for he imitated, admired, deferred to us.... It was
plain he thought of nothing else, and was ready to sacrifice everything
to obtain a smile or a look of approbation." In a less savage fashion
we, too, may admit the not very pleasant truth here enunciated with such
unjust extremeness. An interval of nearly forty years lies between the
date of the "Sketch-Book" and "Bracebridge" and that of "Our Old Home";
the difference in tone fully corresponds to the lapse of time.
In the use of native material, of course, Irving was a pioneer, along
with Cooper, and was in this quite different from Poe, who had no
aptitude in that way. "Knickerbocker's History of New York" is too
farcical to take a high position on this score, though it undoubtedly
had a beneficial effect in stirring up pride and interest in local
antiquities; but "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" were
valuable acquisitions so far as they went. Would that they had been
wrought out with a more masterly touch; and would that Irving had
penetrated further in this direction! But, though these Hudson legends
will long keep his fame renewed, it will perhaps be chiefly as a
historian that he will be prized. His pleasant compilation on Goldsmith,
his "Mahomet," "Columbus," and "Conquest of Granada," though not too
profound, fill an enviable niche in popular esteem; and his mellow and
stately narrative of Washington's life is a work of enduring excellence.
But these lie outside of our present discussion. Nor need we compare his
achievements in native fiction with Hawthorne's, after the review we
have been making of the latter's relation to New England.
Poe and Irving and Hawthorne have all met with acceptance in other
countries, and their works have been translated into several languages.
Irving has exercised no perceptible influence on literature at home or
abroad; Poe has entered more or less into the workings of a school in
England and a group in France. Hawthorne's position on the Continent has
perhaps not been so much one of conquest as of receiving an abstract
admiration; but he has taken much stronger hold of the Anglo-Saxon mind
than either of the others, and it is probable that his share in
inspiring noble literature in America will--as it has already begun to
show itself an important one--become vastly greater in future. It is
impossible, as we have seen, to fix an absolute ratio between these
writers. Irving has a more human quality than Poe, but Poe is beyond
dispute the more original of the two. Each, again, has something which
Hawthorne does not possess. But, if we must attempt at all to reduce so
intricate a problem to exact terms, the mutual position of the three may
be stated in the equation, Poe _plus_ Irving _plus_ an unknown
quantity equals Hawthorne.
XIII.
THE LOSS AND THE GAIN.
The suddenness with which Hawthorne faded away and died, when at the
zenith of his fame, is no less strange and sad and visionary now than it
was a poignant anguish then. He returned from Europe somewhat
lingeringly, as we have seen, knowing too well the difference between
the regions he was quitting and the thinner, sharper, and more wasting
atmosphere of a country where every one who has anything to give is
constantly drawn upon from every side, and has less resource for
intellectual replenishment than in other lands. His seven years in
England and Italy had, on the whole, been a period of high prosperity,
of warm and gratifying recognition, of varied and delightful literary
encounter, in addition to the pleasure of sojourning among so many new
and suggestive scenes. And when he found himself once more on the old
ground, with the old struggle for subsistence staring him steadily in
the face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of
depression would follow. Just as this reaction had set in, the breaking
out of civil war threw upon Hawthorne, before he had time to brace
himself for the shock, an immense burden of sorrowing sympathy. The
conflict of feelings which it excited on the public side has been
sketched; and that alone should have been enough to make the years of
strife a time of continuous gloom and anxiety to him; but it would be
losing sight of a very large element in his distress, not to add that he
mourned over the multitude of private griefs which were the harvest of
battle as acutely as if they had all been his own losses. His intense
imagination burned them too deeply into his heart. How can we call this
weakness, which involved such strength of manly tenderness and sympathy?
"Hawthorne's life was shortened by the war," Mr. Lowell says. Expressing
this view once, to a friend, who had served long in the Union army, I
was met with entire understanding. He told me that his own father, a
stanch Unionist, though not in military service, was as certainly
brought to his death by the war as any of the thousands who fell in
battle. In how wide and touchingly humane a sense may one apply to
Hawthorne Marvell's line on Cromwell's death,--
"To Love and Grief the fatal writ was signed!"