thorne he says: "It is not difficult to portray the lives of ordinary men. But it is different with the man upon whom Providence has lavished such a wealth of gifts as raises him high above his fellows. . . . When we essay to penetrate his (Hawthorne's) genius, we are puzzled and baffled at every step." Such is the feeling of biographers in general in regard to these two men.

Poe's father and mother were actors. Both died when he was three years old, and he was taken into the home of Mr. John Allan, a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Virginia. The child was pretty and precocious, and his foster parents allowed no opportunity to pass without showing him off. He was flattered and fondled and indulged in every way. It is not strange that under such training he became opinionated and perverse and acquired a taste for dissipation. When he reached the age of sixteen or seventeen, Mr. Allan became as strict with him as he had previously been indulgent. His wayward and capricious temper brought him to grief at the University of Virginia and again at West Point, and was a continual hindrance to the happiness and fame that should have marked his career. The tragedy of his life, thus early begun, and accentuated by the sickness and death of his child-wife, to whom he was so tenderly devoted, was ended when he died in Baltimore from the effects of liquor, through which he had tried to forget his loneliness and sorrow. The story of his life is as depressing as one of his own morbid, fantastic tales. From his own character and experience he drew the unhealthy, weird, passionate, and undeniably fascinating qualities which he has embodied in his prose writings.

Hawthorne, on the other hand, was the descendant of a long line of heroes of the sea and of Puritans of the strictest New England type. The shadows of the past lie across his work. He belonged to an era that had outgrown the harshness and intolerance of Puritanism, yet he shared in much of its deepest spiritual life. Hence the obscure problems of existence, the mystery of sin, and the influence of the spiritual and the unseen often became the basis of his stories. At the same time, however, he shared

1 Painter, F. N. V., Introduction to American Literature, pp. 150, 181. Leach, Shewell & Sanborn, Chicago, 1897.

the liberality and tolerance found in the leaders of his own generation. He had the deepest sympathy with health and youth and all the gladness and freedom of the world of nature. In the beginning of "The Scarlet Letter" he tells us of a wild rose bush with delicate pink blossoms that had sprung up beside the ironspiked door of an old Puritan prison. This picture, with its striking contrast, may be taken as a symbol of Hawthorne's own genius.

Hawthorne was born in Salem, Massachusetts; spent his boyhood in the old home of his ancestors, where his brooding and sensitive nature was forced into contact with those melancholy memories of the past which have left their traces on his work; lived a year on the banks of Sebago Lake in Maine, where he ran wild, hunting, fishing, skating, and read at pleasure; was graduated from Bowdoin College; and then spent twelve years in seclusion in Salem, reading from the great writers of prose and cultivating by laborious and incessant effort the delicate finish and refined beauty that afterwards distinguished his style. His married life was a very quiet and happy one. Unlike Poe, his whole life was for the most part surrounded by conditions favorable to the development of his genius. He was retiring and modest in disposition and loathed vulgarity. His reflective temperament gave him insight into the depths of the soul. As we read his tales we have a new sense of the meaning and mystery of existence. Hawthorne's range of themes was rather limited. The dominant note in his tales is well described by Henry James as feeling for the latent romance of New England." As a result of his inheritance and early environment, it was almost inevitable that Hawthorne should turn to the early history of the colonies, around which time had already cast a certain halo of romance. His chief object was not to depict a certain phase of life in its external aspect, or even to present to us certain characters. It was rather to study the working of particular spiritual elements or forces in human life by showing us their operations in a given case. He first conceived a situation in which the interest centered in a moral problem or some spiritual truth. He then told

"a

the story or created the characters so as to study the problem or illustrate the truth. His favorite setting was the gloomy superstition of witchcraft and the most terrible memories of Puritanism and persecution which were connected with his native village. This background is found in the majority of his tales, the best known of which are: "Young Goodman Brown," "The Gentle Boy," "Legends of the Province House," and "The Maypole of Merry Mount." At other times his scenes are laid in Italy, as in "Rappaccini's Daughter," while again they have no tangible, localized background, as "The Hall of Fantasy." But, whether humorous or somber and mysterious in atmosphere, all of his tales have the same general theme-a study of the human soul in its reaction to environment.

Poe also was limited to a narrow range of themes, but they were very unlike those of Hawthorne. The latter saw everything in the light of moral consequences, while Poe cared nothing for moral issues except in so far as he avoided the immoral because it was ugly. Hawthorne appreciated beauty as a true revelation of the inner life. Poe loved beauty and the melody of sound for their own attractiveness. His effects therefore were physical rather than moral. His favorite theme and the one which holds for his readers the deepest and most permanent fascination, was death. Among his masterpieces are to be mentioned "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Ligeia," "The Descent into the Maelstrom," "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," "The Pit and the Pendulum," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget." Their general character may be inferred from the titles. | Poe delighted in the weird, the fantastic, the dismal, the horrible. In his tales we find no warmth of human sympathy, no moral consciousness, no lessons of practical wisdom, all of which Hawthorne gives us in abundance. Poe dwells in a mysterious region, usually under the shadow of death, and conjures up unearthly landscapes as a setting for his gloomy and morbid fancies.

This, however, does not mean that Poe was not as much a master of the short story as was Hawthorne. He merely developed a new phase of it, banishing the moralizing and philosophizing

which Irving and Hawthorne scattered through their tales, and strove to secure by the shortest airline passage the precise effect which he desired.

Poe could not paint character because of his lack of human sympathy. His very nature kept him from uniting frankly and cordially with his fellow men. The men and women who appear in his tales are all phantoms, without warmth, passion, character; they and the realm in which they move are stamped with unreality. They are not “alive”; they are the mechanical hinges on which events turn.

On the other hand, just as truly as Irving gave to American literature the Knickerbockers of New York, and Cooper the pioneer and the Indian, did Hawthorne contribute the character of the Puritan. His immediate ancestors were Puritans of the most virulent type, and his old home was in Salem, where persecution of witches and Quakers had reached its height. Particularly striking are those stories of his in which the characters illustrate the history of New England, such as "The Gentle Boy," "The May Pole of Merry Mount," "Endicott's Red Cross," and "Lady Eleanore's Mantle." We may even include here "Young Goodman Brown," in one sense unreal and fantastic, but in another historically true to the Puritanic idea of the orgies of witches.

Although Hawthorne is best known as a painter of Puritan character, he is also a sympathetic revealer of the souls of other and varied types of people. For instance, we have Beatrice in "Rappaccini's Daughter." She stands under the shadow of involuntary evil, and the study of her character involves the question of whether the soul is to be the victim of circumstances of which it is the unintentional cause.

Again, by character development his satiric powers are given free rein. In "Mrs. Bullfrog," the satire is broad and comparatively commonplace; in "The Celestial Railroad," it enters the world of current religion; in "Feathertop," it serves excellently as a take-off on the contemporary society fop and is imaginatively combined with the uncanny and grotesquely pathetic. Critics have apty said that he never drew the character of a so-called

man of the world, because such a man, by Hawthorne's definition, would really be a man out of the great moral world which to him seemed the only real world.

When we think of Hawthorne, then, it is principally in terms of the characters he created, such as Ethan Brand, the old apple dealer, Beatrice, Owen Warland, the white old maid, or Goodman Brown. When Poe's tales are mentioned, however, one immediately thinks of the weirdest, the most gruesome, and at the same time the most fascinating short stories ever written. They leave this vivid impression because their author was an adept in the creation of the supernatural of an imaginary world. Poe's greatest tale of this type, "The Fall of the House of Usher," has been described as "a prose poem of imaginative fear connected with death and plunging at last into black depths of madness and annihilation."1 Each stroke of the master brush adds to the desired effect. The black and lurid tarn, Roderick Usher with his mental disorder, his sister Madeline who is subject to trances and who is buried prematurely in a vault directly underneath the guest's room, the midnight winds blowing from every direction toward the House of Usher, the chance reading of a sentence from an old rhyme telling of a mysterious noise, the hearing of a muffled sound and the terrible suggestion of its cause, all tend to indicate and heighten the gloom of the final catastrophe. They are the steps to the perfect achievement of the supernatural.

Hawthorne's element of the supernatural deals in a wonderfully artful manner with American Colonial days. He writes for a practical and 'even skeptical generation in a country where, as he himself said, there was nothing but a "commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight," yet he gains our imaginative belief in witchcraft, the elixir of life, the fountain of youth, the magic of alchemy, and other outgrown marvels of their kind. He secures a more or less remote. mystical, or poetical background, in old Colonial times, or perhaps in romantic Italy. He seems to take us into a land which should be familiar but is changed, as

1 Bronson, W. C., History of American Literature. D. C. Heath & Co., Boston, 1900, p. 165.

2 Preface to "The Marble Fawn."