Many of Hawthorne's shorter tales exhibit weirdness, either of
atmosphere or of incident, to a remarkable degree. "Edward Randolph's
Portrait," in "Legends of the Province House," has its diabolic
moments. "The Minister's Black Veil" (founded on an actual incident)
and "The Ambitious Guest" imply much more than they state, whilst
"Ethan Brand"--a fragment of a longer work never completed--rises to
genuine heights of cosmic fear with its vignette of the wild hill
country and the blazing, desolate lime-kilns, and its delineation
of the Byronic "unpardonable sinner," whose troubled life ends with
a peal of fearful laughter in the night as he seeks rest amidst the
flames of the furnace. Some of Hawthorne's notes tell of weird tales he
would have written had he lived longer--an especially vivid plot being
that concerning a baffling stranger who appeared now and then in public
assemblies, and who was at last followed and found to come and go from
a very ancient grave.
But foremost as a finished, artistic unit among all our author's
weird material is the famous and exquisitely wrought novel, "The
House of the Seven Gables," in which the relentless working out of
an ancestral curse is developed with astonishing power against the
sinister background of a very ancient house--one of those peaked
Gothic affairs which formed the first regular building-up of our New
England coast towns, but which gave way after the seventeenth century
to the more familiar gambrel-roofed or classic Georgian types now known
as "Colonial." Of these old gabled Gothic houses scarcely a dozen are
to be seen today in their original condition throughout the United
States, but one well-known to Hawthorne still stands in Turner Street,
Salem, and is pointed out with doubtful authority as the scene and
inspiration of the romance. Such an edifice, with its spectral peaks,
its clustered chimneys, its overhanging second story, its grotesque
corner-brackets, and its diamond-paned lattice windows, is indeed an
object well-calculated to evoke sombre reflections; typifying as it
does the dark Puritan age of concealed horror and witch-whispers which
preceded the beauty, rationality, and spaciousness of the eighteenth
century. Hawthorne saw many in his youth, and knew the black tales
connected with some of them. He heard, too, many rumours of a curse
upon his own line as the result of his great-grandfather's severity as
a witchcraft judge in 1692.
From this setting came the immortal tale--New England's greatest
contribution to weird literature--and we can feel in an instant the
authenticity of the atmosphere presented to us. Stealthy horror
and disease lurk within the weather-blackened, moss-crusted, and
elm-shadowed walls of the archaic dwelling so vividly displayed,
and we grasp the brooding malignity of the place when we read that
its builder--old Colonel Pyncheon--snatched the land with peculiar
ruthlessness from its original settler, Matthew Maule, whom he
condemned to the gallows as a wizard in the year of the panic. Maule
died cursing old Pyncheon--"God will give him blood to drink"--and
the waters of the old well on the seized land turned bitter. Maule's
carpenter son consented to build the great gabled house for his
father's triumphant enemy, but the old Colonel died strangely on the
day of its dedication. Then followed generations of odd vicissitudes,
with queer whispers about the dark powers of the Maules, and peculiar
and sometimes terrible ends befalling the Pyncheons.
The overshadowing malevolence of the ancient home--almost as alive
as Poe's House of Usher, tho in subtler way--pervades the tale as a
recurrent motif pervades an operatic tragedy; and when the main story
is reached, we behold the modern Pyncheons in a pitiable state of
decay. Poor old Hepzibah, the eccentric reduced gentlewoman; childlike,
unfortunate Clifford, just released from undeserved imprisonment;
sly and treacherous Judge Pyncheon, who is the old Colonel all
over again--all these figures are tremendous symbols, and are well
matched by the stunted vegetation and anaemic fowls in the garden.
It was almost a pity to supply a fairly happy ending, with a union
of sprightly Phoebe, cousin and last scion of the Pyncheons, to the
prepossessing young man who turns out to be the last of Maules. This
union, presumably, ends the curse. Hawthorne avoids all violence of
diction or movement, and keeps his implications of terror well in
the background; but occasional glimpses amply serve to sustain the
mood and redeem the work from pure allegorical aridity. Incidents like
the bewitching of Alice Pyncheon in the early eighteenth century,
and the spectral music of her harpsichord which precedes a death
in the family--the latter a variant of an immemorial type of Aryan
myth--link the action directly with the supernatural; whilst the dread
nocturnal vigil of old Judge Pyncheon in the ancient parlour, with his
frightfully ticking watch, is stark horror of the most poignant and
genuine sort. The way in which the Judge's death is first adumbrated
by the motions and sniffing of a strange cat outside the window, long
before the fact is suspected either by the reader or by any of the
characters, is a stroke of genius which Poe could not have surpassed.
Later the strange cat watches intently outside that same window in the
night and on the next day, for--something. It is clearly the psychopomp
of primeval myth, fitted and adapted with infinite deftness to its
latter-day setting.
But Hawthorne left no well-dined literary posterity. His mood and
attitude belonged to the age which closed with him, and it is the
spirit of Poe--who so clearly and realistically understood the
natural basis of the horror--appeal and the correct mechanics of its
achievements--which survived and blossomed. Among the earliest of Poe's
disciples may be reckoned the brilliant young Irishman Fitz-James
O'Brien (1828-1862) who became naturalized as an American and perished
honourably in the Civil War. It is he who gave us "What Was It?" the
first well-shaped short story of a tangible but invisible being, and
the prototype of de Maupassant's "Horla;" he also who created the
inimitable "Diamond Lens," in which a young microscopist falls in love
with a maiden of an infinitesimal world which he has discovered in a
drop of water. O'Brien's early death undoubtedly deprived us of some
masterful tales of strangeness and terror, though his genius was not,
properly speaking, of the same titan quality which characterized Poe
and Hawthorne.
(Discontinued At This Point)
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